We used to spend a lot of time in western Georgia’s Samegrelo region when breakaway Abkhazia was our beat. Zugdidi, the regional capital, was our overnight stop coming and going across the river to the disputed land in the north. Our local friends would welcome us with Megrelian hospitality, decorating their tables with hearty and spicy local fare that made us purr. The wine, however, with its sweet barnyard vinegary tang, was a different story. We assumed that this subtropic-like land, with its year-round lushness and mandarin, hazelnut and overgrown tea fields, was hostile to good wine grapes. We didn’t realize back then that the practice of making sugar-wine was not exclusively a Megrelian thing, but a Communist legacy practiced throughout the country.

Going to dinner at a Georgian restaurant typically means having to fast all day. The table will bulge with must-orders: tomato and cucumber salad, badrijani (eggplant stuffed with garlic and walnuts), an assortment of cheeses and wild greens, and probably pkhali (vegetable pate with walnuts) too. There will be meat, lots of meat – lamb, pork, veal and chicken that will be stewed, baked and roasted – and bread to clean the plate with. Perhaps there will be a grilled trout. And don’t forget the khachapuri, because that is just the way it is. After several hours at the table, we will make our final toasts, take one last look at the leftovers, maybe snatch a farewell nibble at a loose chive or slice of cucumber and then waddle out of the joint, with greasy grins and logy eyelids. We grunt while we plop into the taxi and groan as we struggle to climb out when we get home.

In 2005, the city of Tbilisi bulldozed a riverside row of some the best restaurants in the capital to make way for a lackluster park and a gondola to take tourists to the ancient ruins of the Narikala Fortress, which overlooks the Old Town. City Hall justified this act of gastronomic destruction by stating the property had been illegally privatized under the previous administration, but everyone knew it was a land grab. And among the many restaurants it razed was Megrelebi Manoni, the best Megrelian restaurant in Tbilisi. Of all the regions that make up “Georgian cooking,” the western province of Samegrelo is the most distinctive.