It was in 2007, when, on a hunger-induced whim, we called a friend and asked him to meet us for lunch at a new place that had been beckoning from a Rustaveli Boulevard side street for some weeks. Tbilisi’s main drag was bereft of quality, low-priced eats, and the down-home warmth wafting down the street offered the promise of good fortune. This was before the homey little joint was known, a time when our party of two could occupy the eight-top under the window instead of the surrounding cozy, semi-enclosed booths.

The menu has a moderate selection of standard Georgian fare: kabobi (Persian-influenced skewered ground meat), mtsvadi (skewered chunks of pork, chicken, beef or lamb) and ostri, a spicy beef stew, all of which are delicious. The restaurant also has several specialty items baked in ketsi (ceramic casseroles): roasted veal, quail or chicken in tomatoes; fried eggplant in tomato and cheese; and roasted ojakhuri (pork, onion and potatoes) in a pomegranate sauce.

But the real attraction here is Georgia’s signature mouthwatering delight, khinkali, fat dumplings stuffed with a robust mixture of meats, spices and herbs. Pasanauri is named after a mountain village famed for its khinkali, so it’s no wonder that the restaurant really excels at making them, finding the perfect balance of light dough, perfectly seasoned juice and well-spiced meat that melts in your mouth.

Khinkali are a staple of Georgia’s Khevsureti and Tusheti mountain regions and are thought to have come from Central Asia’s steamed dumplings, known as manti. Although the recipe is relatively simple, the formulas are as unique as fingerprints, and because they are ordered by the shovel-load, they are very labor-intensive. Dough consistency varies, as do the stuffing and stock. Mushrooms, cheese and potato purée are meat substitutes, particularly during religious fasting periods. They’re not commonly found in restaurants, but Pasanauri has them on the menu. The stuffing is placed inside a round piece of thin dough, which is then folded several times into a little bag, pinched at the top to form a nipple so that you can hold it while eating, which is an art in itself.

First, you sprinkle some pepper on the dumpling, and when it’s cool enough to pick up, you bite a hole in the side to slurp down the juice, and then you gobble it all down, leaving only the dough nubs so that you can keep track of how many you have devoured. Eating these with a knife and fork is not just a cultural faux pas, but also an awkward mess. Moreover, the method lends itself to experiencing all the layers of the dumpling, each one an individual meal. Because they come from beer-brewing mountain regions, khinkali are not ordinarily paired with wine.

Every Georgian has his or her favorite sakhinkle (khinkali house). A critical palate will discern doughs that are too thick and rubbery or too thin and delicate, the meat too gristly or the juice too greasy. Seeing gobs of coagulated fat and butter on the plate as leaky khinkali cool is an unappetizing experience. And because eating khinkali is typically a boisterous male ritual that includes the mass consumption of beer and vodka, little effort goes into embellishing a standard sakhinkle outside the cold tones of fluorescent lights, off-white tiles and nondescript prints hanging crookedly on the walls.

Pasanauri is not a sakhinkle. In fact, a lot of thought went into its rather surreal interior design. The motif is “mountain cabin,” with 11 sturdy wooden tables and thick lattice dividers, giving each table a bit of privacy, which Georgians like to have. Robert Capa’s 1947 Tbilisi photos hanging on the green walls mean somebody has good taste, but the aesthetics get bizarre on the ceiling, where there is a bearskin rug and an installation of a Georgian mountain supra (feast) hanging upside down.

No matter – we’re here for the food. Lunch ended with us beaming with greasy smirks of gratification and 20 khinkali nipples on our plates.

The post The Khinkali Chronicles appeared first on Culinary Backstreets.

Editor’s note: We are marking Culinary Backstreets’ third anniversary with expansion into our seventh city, Tbilisi, whose extraordinary culinary pleasures remain one of the world’s best-kept secrets.

The taxi driver almost sideswiped a bus and nearly ran over a scurrying jaywalker when he looked back at us with a gleam in his eye and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and asked, “You like Georgia? Georgia wine? Georgia food?” It’s a three-in-one question we’ve been obliged to answer hundreds of times with a sincere “We love it!” This amounts to a personal declaration of love, for Georgians are infinitely proud of the rich fracas of bold dishes inherent only to this little Black Sea country of 4.5 million. But don’t let their smiles fool you; gastronomy is all tradition and the people here take their heritage seriously. Georgians do not dine alone and do not drink alcohol without an accompanying platter of food, even if it’s a simple contribution of bread and cheese. Eating is a ritualistic affair with strict table rules. Unlike in the West, there are no individual courses. A meal is a feast with a bounty of various hot and cold dishes literally stacked upon themselves that each person shares.

Tbilisi food culture goes back to the middle of the 5th century, when, according to legend, King Vakhtang I Gorgasali lost his falcon on a hunting trip and found it poaching with a pheasant in a sulfur hot spring. Thus, a city was born. Tbilisi grew to become a multiethnic metropolis and trading hub on the great Silk Road. Roman, Arab, Persian, Byzantine, Turkish and Russian guests and occupiers have all left their indelible mark on Tbilisi, but they never managed to really conquer the Georgians, who are the real masters of subjugation. Their weapons are food and wine.

The city is a melting pot of a little over 1 million people. It’s a collision of modern and ancient, neither Europe nor Asia, singularly “Tbilisi,” where tradition is the overriding theme. Walk down a given street and you will smell the seductive aroma of fresh bread wafting out of old cellar bakeries, baked in cylindrical clay ovens just as it always has been. New wine shops offer bottles of family-produced vintages made with the same organic methods that have been practiced for thousands of years. Alternatively there’s the neighborhood dealer, who sells homemade wine and chacha, Georgian grappa, in plastic Coke bottles from his makeshift shop. For snacks, little window nooks sell khachapuri (cheese bread), lobiani (bean-stuffed bread) and other pastries stuffed with potatoes, mushrooms or tarragon and rice.

Because food and wine play such a significant role in the nation’s social and cultural character, it’s no surprise that there is a profusion of restaurants in Tbilisi. Some specialize in specific regional dishes or offer a spectrum of Georgian recipes, which people somehow never tire of. Nothing comes out of a can; the freshest of seasonal ingredients are used to make dishes like chakapuli, a tarragon, cherry plum and lamb stew we must wait all winter to indulge in.

Georgian cuisine has long been celebrated by Russians and other ex-Soviet peoples who hopped cheap flights from Moscow, back in the day, to gorge on Georgia’s respected fare of khinkali (boiled dumplings), mtsvadi (broiled skewered meat) and kabobi (broiled ground meat with herbs). When the Iron Curtain fell, a decade of political and social chaos followed, and Georgia became renowned for crime and corruption, while its culinary sumptuousness remained one of the world’s best-kept secrets. Those nefarious days, however, are a part of the past. Tbilisi is now considered one of the safest cities in Europe and is seeing an upsurge in tourism, which means more people are discovering the wild culinary spirit that is the heart of Georgia.

(photo © 2015 Uta Bayer)

The post Tbilisi appeared first on Culinary Backstreets.

Ènek poured a rosy-colored splash of wine into our glasses, avidly explaining how this particular Aladasturi grape vine was meticulously cultivated in its native west Georgia. In a tasting ritual uncommon in Georgia, we swirled it, sniffed it and savored the flavor as it caressed our tongues. Here in the “cradle of wine,” the land where viticulture is believed to have originated 8,000 years ago, wine is customarily poured into a water glass and “tasted” in one long drag, until drained. But in this cozy cellar in the heart of Tbilisi’s historic Sololaki neighborhood, seven winemakers have come together to offer an alternative convention to winemaking and consumption. They call it Vino Underground, but we call it wine heaven.

“This wine is made by an 80-year-old man in Imereti,” Ènek said. “He’s only bottled 500.”

Vino Underground offers about 100 family-produced Georgian wines, most of them made much like they have been for thousands of years, in ceramic qvevris, tear-shaped vessels buried in the ground and found in nearly every basement in east Georgia’s wine region of Kakheti. But what sets this wine apart from what is normally consumed in the country is the acute care given to the vine. Vino Underground’s co-op think of themselves as grape cultivators rather than winemakers, following an intrinsic philosophy of “listening to the vines” to help them develop a resilient immune system naturally, instead of fertilizing them with chemicals. By the time the grapes get to the cellar, nothing needs to be added to help the fermentation process. You can taste the personal touch that goes into each bottle.

That night we were sampling whites, working our way to Georgia’s distinctive tannin-infused, amber colored wine, a result of the inclusion of skins, seeds and stems in the fermentation process. After sampling a straw-colored, citrusy Kisi, we settled on a bottle of Rkatsiteli, which is Georgia’s most popular white.

Ènek Peterson walked us through several wines, impressing us with a profound knowledge of the background of each bottle, all with an enthusiasm she couldn’t hide. The 21-year-old Boston native eloped with Georgia when she failed to board her flight back home seven months ago, after coming here to learn Georgian folk singing. Already a fluent Georgian speaker, she is fast becoming an expert on natural local wines, and this Rkatsiteli she selected for us was divine.

“This wine comes from Zaza Darsavelidze. He’s a soldier and security guard by profession but inherited the business from his father,” Ènek explained. “Zaza takes his 4-year-old son with him to the marani” – wine cellar – “and vineyards because he feels it’s so important for this tradition to be carried on.”

Vino Underground isn’t the kind of place you visit if you’re hungry, which is unheard of in this Black Sea nation where wine and supper are as inseparable as salt is from the sea. But they do offer savory treats well suited to partnering with their wide selection of wines, which also includes European and Kiwi vintages. We skipped the platter of local cheeses, preferring to try that evening’s specials of fried Sulguni cheese with sorrel and Ekala with walnuts. Sulguni is best described as a kind of mozzarella, while Ekala is a spinach-like plant native to west Georgia. While both are simply outstanding, at Vino Underground it is the wine that really shines.

The post Vino Underground appeared first on Culinary Backstreets.

Last week we had a hankering for baked brains, and in Tbilisi that used to mean only one thing – a visit to Alani, the Ossetian restaurant near the sulfur baths in Old Tbilisi. Named after the ancient North Caucasus kingdom of the Alans, ancestors of the modern-day Ossetians, one might think it unpopular in a country that lost a war against Ossetian separatists (and Russians) in 2008, but the fact that it is highly regarded is testament to Georgia’s paradoxically tolerant nature. Of course, it helps to have consistently quality cooking too.

To our disappointment, the waitress informed us that they were out of brains, so we lunched on Georgian fare of baked chicken tabaka and chakapuli, lamb stewed in tarragon and sour plums. And no meal at Alani is complete without a serving of its signature khabizgini, the Ossetian potato and cheese version of Georgia’s champion cheese bread, khachapuri.

For the next seven days, we continued to salivate at the idea of baked brains, so we suggested Alani for a dinner date with our friends yesterday. This time, however, a waitress who could be Tinkerbell’s double, told us that there would be no brains that day or any other day. She offered no explanation. Disappointed, but not discouraged, we loaded up on the delicious chakapuli and khabizgini again and washed it all down with Alani’s own beer, a cloudy yet flavorful lager. Management boasts that you might find microbrew elsewhere in Tbilisi, but nothing is as natural as theirs. Dessert was a few shots of the house chacha, Georgia’s homemade version of grappa, which raised the hair on the back of our necks. The bill was surprisingly low, considering how much alcohol we all consumed.

Granted, like baked brains, Alani is not for everyone, although it certainly tries to be. Upstairs is “the brewery,” a beer hall with wooden tables and a few small private booths to the side. It can get a bit rowdy at times with lots of shouting and back slapping between mouthfuls of khinkali, so we generally go to the retro dining room downstairs, a dark cellar adorned in Soviet-era ethno-Georgian reliefs with a front porch-like stage for the house band – a female singer and her male accompanist, who plays the keyboard by pushing the program for each song. The playlist is a mixture of Georgian and Russian estrada, Georgian folk and the occasional Sinatra for spice.

While Alani’s dining atmosphere might be too kitsch for some, it’s worth remembering that Tbilisi’s Old Town has largely been made over into a Disneyesque replication of itself. But nothing has changed in Alani’s 40-something-year history, excluding the renovated washrooms. In a neighborhood full of great restaurants, Alani holds its own, but its greatest attribute is its authenticity. In a private room a few meters away from us, a group was having a party around a table stacked with plates of food, making bold toasts with their own wine. One of the revelers approached us with a warm grin and stretched out his hand. “You like Georgian peasant wine?” he asked.

The post Alani appeared first on Culinary Backstreets.

With cafes popping up all over the country, from the arty boutique coffee houses of Tbilisi, to the Lavazza kiosks in villages like Zestafoni, it is easy to forget the humbler days of Georgia’s coffee culture, when an “Americano” was a chemically enhanced instant coffee powder in a stars-and-stripes-emblazoned packet added to a cup of hot water.

Before the proliferation of espresso machines, a real mug of joe meant a little porcelain cup of Turkuli – “Turkish” coffee – cooked cowboy-style by adding a heaping spoonful of ground coffee (and several spoons of sugar) to cold water and heating it in a plastic electric kettle or little copper pot on the stove. In Georgian homes, this is still the most widespread method for brewing coffee.

Like most local connoisseurs, we used to buy our coffee from our favorite bean dealers, which for us was an Armenian woman who rented a space in a nearby second-hand clothes shop and sold beans in plastic buckets labeled with such dubious monikers as Colombo, Nescafé and Pele. Knowing we liked our coffee potent but not too biting, she offered a blend of “Arabica” and “Mambo” beans, which suited us just fine.

Whenever we wanted to go the extra mile for good coffee, however, we would go to the main bazaar, next to Tbilisi’s central railway station, where another favorite dealer offered her special blend from a selection of over a dozen beans. For years, we were quite satisfied coffee junkies, meticulously brewing our Turkuli every morning, never imagining that life could get better. And then we met Ruben Avetisian, Georgia’s coffee guru.

It was late October, 2010 when the 64-year-old Yerevan native cleaned out a little storefront on Perovskaya/Akhvlediani street and equipped it with a coffee roasting machine. Soon the little strip of Irish style pubs and Asian massage parlors was wafting in the seductive scent of roasting arabica and robusta beans, emanating from Le Cafe Du Monde. Our days of Mambo beans were part of the past.

“Oh, the beans from the bazaar are a catastrophe!” Avetisian shrieked, still drenched in sweat after a bout of roasting an hour earlier on this hot June afternoon. “Where are they roasted? I don’t know, but I think they are Indonesian beans. Cheap.”

Indonesian beans are an abomination to Avetisian. He says they smell like fish and are too wet. “There are only African beans and South American beans,” he said, switching to a heavily accented English, although he concedes that Indian Bababudan and Nepalese beans are excellent too.

An Orientalist by profession who worked with the Armenian diaspora during Soviet times, Avetisian found himself without a job when the USSR disappeared, but he was “saved” by Valerie Gortsunian, a former associate whose family members were coffee magnates in France. She took him under her wing, teaching him the ins and outs of coffee until he decided to strike out on his own in Tbilisi, a venture that proved to be quite challenging at first.

“Georgians don’t know how to drink coffee!” he lamented. Yet, his diligence and dedication to coffee is slowly paying off. He says more clients are realizing the difference between his personally hand-roasted organic beans to the mass-produced Lavazza, which most local restaurants and cafes buy. “I don’t roast quickly, like most Europeans,” he says. “I go slowly because I love the taste of the bean, not of the roast.”

Avetisian does not like selling decaffeinated coffee and prefers to offer his Number 10 blend, which he says is “light and delicate” and better to drink than chemically processed beans. For drinkers who want a kick, he recommends his espresso mix of 20 percent robusta and 80 percent arabica, or straight Ethiopia beans. But for flavor, Ruben offers his own blends like “Pirosmani,” named after Tbilisi’s favorite painter, for strong coffee lovers, and “Parajanov,” named after the famed Tbilisi-Armenian director and artist. His personal favorite is Number 5, which he insists is a perfect balance of strength and flavor.

Recently, Ruben slightly burnt five kilos of beans, which he could have sold, but he threw it away instead. “Roasting is an art. You have to have pride in this,” he said. “It’s better to lose five kilos of burnt beans than to lose your clients.”

The post Le Café du Monde appeared first on Culinary Backstreets.

Foreigners call it “cheese pie,” but khachapuri translates to “curds bread” – although it is much, much more than that. It is, without a doubt, Georgia’s most signature victual.

In a land with no breakfast culture to speak of, a couple slices of khachapuri and a cup of tea or coffee are all it takes to fuel you up until suppertime. If you need a snack to carry you over, you grab a pie at any one of the hundreds of khachapuri stands in Tbilisi and no supra – feast – is complete without an “Imeretian” or “Megrelian” pie for every three people at the table. Then there’s the heart attack special, adjaruli, a meal in itself, a fluffy boat-shaped crust stuffed with cheese and topped with an egg, sunny-side up, floating in the center with a big wad of butter on top.

Typically round, khachapuri and its cousins lobiani (stuffed with beans), Gurian (boiled eggs), Ossetian (potato and cheese), kubdari (mutton and herbs) and other meat/tarragon/rice/spinach variations come in all shapes and sizes, from grenade-like to submarine-shaped. The cheese pies may be salty, depending on the cheese, or may have little cheese at all; they may be oozing in butter or have flaky crusts as opposed to doughy ones. Whatever the type, khachapuri is the country’s original fast food and is a Georgian’s best friend. In a 2009 countrywide poll, 88 percent of Georgians stated that they preferred khachapuri to pizza.

Across Tbilisi, there are several superb khachapuri restaurants, but there is one in a cellar in the center of the city that is noteworthy for offering more than delicious cheese and meat and potato pies. Sarcho is a cross between a delicatessen and mini-ethnographic museum. You can order khachapuri, take a seat and wash it down with Tbilisi’s legendary Laghidze soda water, flavored with a rainbow-colored array of fruit syrups, while a temperature-controlled room in the back has been remade into a little marani, or traditional wine cellar, where they sell homemade wines, fruit vodkas, brandies and chacha, Georgia’s infamous grappa, in addition to several bottled varieties.

Sarcho is the only place in the center of the city that sells dambalkhacho, a distinctive hard cheese made only in the tiny Pshavi region in the high Caucasus. Made from buttermilk cottage cheese, it is kneaded into balls, dried over a fire and then aged in the darkness in ceramic pots for several months. Other more straightforward, equally pungent indigenous cheeses are also on hand, along with matzoni, Georgian yogurt, honey and other natural products. “Everything is organic and made by hand. I want to introduce Georgian delicacies that few people know into the mainstream,” said owner, Nugzar Khahniauri, a native of Pshavi who opened Sarcho five years ago. He is particularly proud of the wine and claims his is the only shop that exclusively sells natural homemade wine, made without additives. While there are wine shops and restaurants that sell organic wines in Tbilisi, none offer it in plastic bottles, along with a wide variety of a warm, freshly baked khachapuri.

The post Sarcho appeared first on Culinary Backstreets.

We are sitting under the tonic canopy of an enormous pine tree in a hidden Tbilisi garden, licking our lips over menu items that are neither European nor Georgian. When our dining companion informs us she will not share her trout tartare with adjika (highly concentrated spicy red pepper paste), we realize there will be no plate-dipping tonight. Just as we settle on our main courses, a woman in a blue chef’s jacket comes up to our table, beaming bonhomie, and asks if she can help us in any way. This is Tekuna Gachechiladze, the blue-eyed Tbilisi chef dedicated to changing the way Georgians understand their food culture. We are sitting at her latest culinary venture, Cafe Littera.

The setting couldn’t be more appropriate. At the turn of the 20th century, philanthropist and father of Georgian brandy David Sarajishvili hired a German-Georgian team of architects to build a house to commemorate his 25th wedding anniversary. Located in the heart of Tbilisi’s Sololaki neighborhood, this remarkable Euro-Georgian Art Nouveau creation would become the center of the capital’s cultural life for the next 100 years. Today it is known as the Writer’s House of Georgia, and its lush courtyard garden is where Tekuna has chosen to revive Georgia’s culinary legacy, which had been an evolving marriage of cultures until the Communists arrived and forcibly inundated the country with their version of tradition.

“Old Georgian cookbooks are full of French recipes. In the 19th century, every housewife in Georgia made béchamel sauce,” Tekuna says.

The Communists favored Georgian peasant dishes, which are the staples of the local diet today. Any tampering with this food will provoke severe castigation from many Georgians, who consider modifications to their national dishes an offense to their cultural identity. It doesn’t matter that khinkali came from Central Asia and primary ingredients like corn and pomegranates come from North America and Persia, respectively. To these xenophobes, Georgian cuisine is holy like Georgian Christianity and must be preserved, not altered. They view Tekuna with her innovations as a threat to Georgia’s ancient traditions, while she sees herself as someone who is maintaining Georgia’s multicultural traditions.

“I like mussels but I don’t really like parsley, so I thought, ‘Chakapuli has tarragon, sour plums and white wine. Why not substitute mussels for the meat?’”

The result is rich, piquant and strictly Georgian excellence. Tekuna’s “why nots” have led her to stuff zucchini flowers with mint and nadugi (a local creamy cheese) and to substitute jonjoli (local bladdernut seed pods) for capers in her meat tartare. While other dishes – like seared tuna sesame with French beans and chili sauce – are unabashedly non-Georgian, the dining manner is.

Slow Food might be a movement in the west, but in Georgia, where a single dinner can last into the wee hours of the morning, it is inherent to the lifestyle. Tekuna nurtures this tradition by preparing each dish to order, including the meat-cutting and sauce-making. She personally welcomes each guest to enjoy the experience with her warm, natural charm, although we need no coaxing in this seductive garden as we sip cool wine on a hot summer night. There is little table turnover at Cafe Littera.

Tekuna’s stellar cooking career is the result of an adventitious chain of events that brought her to New York City, where she dropped out of her doctorate program in psychology and signed up for cooking school. She returned to Tbilisi in 2006, eager to do something “revolutionary” in a country where the menu in each and every restaurant was the same. She started at a French restaurant, moved on to American and then explored the possibilities of fusing Asian with Georgian, winning over former President Mikheil Saakashvili, who saw how her cooking complemented his vision of a modern country. “Misha,” as he is called in Georgia, often called on Tekuna to prepare her takes on Georgian food for visiting dignitaries. Two and a half years ago, she opened a 30-seat restaurant, Culinarium, the first exclusively chef-owned restaurant in Tbilisi, which is her laboratory for new ideas, and she also hosts a weekly cooking show on TV.

Tekuna’s artistry has garnered her the title “Queen of Georgian Fusion,” a moniker she eschews with a slight blush and roll of the eyes. “I don’t like the word ‘fusion.’ I make modern Georgian food,” she says. While there are others in the country pushing the limits of Georgian cuisine, Tekuna’s consequential influence is unquestionable. Her students are opening restaurants and teaching at Tbilisi’s only accredited cooking school, while Georgian housewives are doing things like turning their tired beef stews into boeuf bourguignon and transforming the domestic palate.

“It’s slowly changing. A lot of young people are learning to cook, traveling and tasting different things. Twenty years ago, it was much different. It needs time to develop. I’m sure in 10, 15 years Georgian cuisine will be more vibrant, more alive than 10 years ago. That’s my hope and dream,” Tekuna says.

The post Cafe Littera appeared first on Culinary Backstreets.

The 19th-century homes in old Tbilisi neighborhoods were built in a style Georgians call “Italian Courtyards,” where through a gate or arch you enter a quad enclosed by stories of balconies shared by each family on the floor. This courtyard was the nucleus of each building where kids safely romped around, monitored by adults from the windows above, as men contemplated domino moves at a table under a tree and women beat rugs on an iron rack in a corner.

This stereotypical image is disappearing from Tbilisi reality as courtyards become parking lots, kids play on computers and more people socialize outside the home in the city’s growing number of pubs, cafes and restaurants. But there is one Italian courtyard in the heart of Tbilisi’s historic Sololaki district where a group of friends are striving to bring back that old Tbilisi sensibility to life, one healthy bite at a time.

Giorgi (Gio) Lomsadze, Irakli Bakhtadze and their families share a passion for food and how it is grown. Late in September they opened their restaurant Ezo, which means “courtyard” in Georgian, after trying to sell totally organic produce in Tbilisi’s upscale Vake Park neighborhood. The problem with that enterprise, they stated, was not the demand, but the supply.

Most Georgians equate freshness with naturalness and don’t understand that just because the apples at the shop may have been picked yesterday does not mean they are not covered in carcinogenic pesticides. The Bolnisi region of southern Georgia is famed for its tomatoes and cheese, but studies have shown that the runoff from the Soviet-era goldmine in Sakdrisi has polluted irrigation water with high concentrates of metals and poisons for decades. The idea that Georgian food is inherently wholesome is a myth and the people at Ezo believe Georgians deserve better, healthier foodstuffs.

Ezo is more than an organic food restaurant in the making; it is part of a larger scheme to develop sustainable organic farming in Georgia. Lomsadze and Bakhtadze have a 200-square-meter greenhouse that currently grows about a dozen products while they learn how to cultivate more difficult crops. They are also working with a few small organic farmers. Their potatoes and tomatoes, for example, come from small farmers high in the mountainous region of Svaneti who have begun a canning business exclusively for Ezo. This is the kind of micro-agricultural development the people at Ezo hope to incentivize. Lomsadze and Bakhtadze have established a fund that uses 3 percent of their profits to provide in kind support to help small local farmers develop organic farms and next year, Ezo’s Sololaki courtyard will host a weekly organic farmers’ market.

“We are not yet 100 percent organic – that will take a few years,” Bakhtadze said. “What is important is that we make a business without cheating.”

Ezo will not cut corners and will not pretend to be something it isn’t. Its honest food philosophy extends to service too. The waitstaff are not as much employees as they are friends who share the same vision of serving simple, quality natural dishes to their customers. “In Georgia, waiters are treated like servants,” Lomsadze told us. “We want to change that mentality.”

Lomsadze and Bakhtadze found a head cook with some professional experience before he could “develop bad habits,” which Lomsadze contends are impossible to break. Menu development is a team effort. The current dishes were selected from family recipes and from the renowned Georgian feminist Barbara Jorjadze’s iconic 1874 cookbook, Complete Cuisine. Ezo offers no khinkali (dumplings), kababi (broiled ground meat logs) or khachapuri (cheese pie), which can be found in virtually every other Georgian restaurant in the country. The concept is to serve original, uncomplicated food, just like mom.

Two elderly neighborhood men recently walked into the restaurant, surveyed the creative decor and asked for “schnapps,” believing they had entered a European restaurant. “After lunch they said they hadn’t tasted food like this since they were kids. Now they are regular customers,” recounted Bakhtadze. “The menu is based on what we grew up with. It’s familiar to everyone.”

That may be so, but we have not been to any Tbilisi eatery that offers katami Gurulad – free-range chicken cooked Gurian-style in a rich herb-infused broth that includes cinnamon, a spice rarely seen in the Georgian kitchen. Ezo’s beet salad would be any old beet salad if not for the addition of finely diced dried plums, while the vegetable and beef soups are a refreshing respite to Georgia’s customary chikirtma (chicken and coriander soup) and kharcho (beef and rice soup). The thick, gently marinated grilled pork chops come from a local Swiss meat farmer who is probably the only person who ages meat in the country.

While the recipes alone are reason enough to visit Ezo, it is the naturalness of the food that takes the palate by surprise. Fried potatoes are about as ho-hum as side dishes go, which explains why everybody in the world eats them with ketchup or mayonnaise. But Ezo’s Svaneti potatoes fried with onion are a wonder to devour on their own, and when eaten with “mother’s tkemali” (cherry plum) sauce, they are pure Georgian heaven.

“We have learned that what is most important is to have the proper ingredients,” Bakhtadze said. “No cheating, just simple, quality product.”

The post Ezo appeared first on Culinary Backstreets.

In the Caucasus, guests are considered gifts from God. Georgians like to call them okros stumrebi – “golden guests” – an endearment that illustrates the stature the ever-hospitable Georgians give to those they host. And whenever our own golden guests come to visit in this remote corner of the world, we never fail to entertain them in our own surrogate dining room, Shavi Lomi (the Black Lion).

The cellar restaurant is an homage to Georgia’s favorite artist, Niko Pirosmani, a naive painter whose favorite subjects were animals, a singer named Margarita and feast scenes. The flea market furniture, tablecloths and china make the Black Lion an ideal setting for anybody hankering to create a one-of-a-kind, laid-back feast scene of his own, with hearty original takes on traditional Georgian cooking.

The restaurant is the brainchild of local celebrity chef Meriko Gubeladze, who opened Shavi Lomi in May 2011 with three of her friends: interior designer Guga Kotestishvili, film director Levan Koguashvili and Tazo Kipshidze. Word quickly spread about a new mouthwatering place serving never-before-seen dishes like green grits (ghomi, a western Georgia staple, is white), khachapuritos, which are chicken or beef quesadillas with thin Armenian lavash substituting for tortillas, and Ghobi, an enormous wooden bowl packed with appetizers – jonjoli, a cheese assortment, phkali (beet, walnut and spinach paste), pickles, beans, corn bread and other delights – that everyone dips into communally.

The Shavi Lomi menu is not so much fusion as it is a kind of “refrigerator surprise,” a culinary brainstorm of ingredients and ideas in which Gubeladze and her cooks, who offer their own regional favorite dishes, end up inventing completely new recipes. Xveula, for example, is a simple flour-and-sugar peasant dish that mothers in Racha, a remote mountain region, offer their children to keep them quiet, explained waitress Tamuna Jordania, the heart and soul of Shavi Lomi.

“Instead of sugar, we put cheese with mushrooms or spinach and it’s just great!” Jordania said with a beaming enthusiasm rarely seen in waitstaff in Georgia. “You really have to come on Friday or Saturday to try our new special,” she added. “It’s chicken baked inside a pumpkin with tomatoes, walnuts and purple basil.”

Jordania and the entire crew have been with Shavi Lomi from the beginning. They aren’t so much employees as they are a family doing what they love for the benefit of the family. Patrons can’t help but pick up on that kindred vibe. The international musicians who come to perform at the annual Tbilisi Jazz festival have made Shavi Lomi their unofficial restaurant. On her 2013 album, Soul Quest, pianist Keiko Matsui penned two songs inspired by the restaurant, “The Black Lion” and “Night of Cha Cha.”

We asked Gubeladze what happened to the crazy delicious chacha (moonshine) with the pears in the bottles that they used to serve. (To produce it, the farmer ties bottles to pear trees as the fruit sprouts and then grows inside.) She told us that last year, a wind storm knocked most of the bottles off the farmer’s trees. This year, she confessed, the jazz musicians from the festival finished off all the special chacha.

The post Shavi Lomi appeared first on Culinary Backstreets.

Editor’s note: This is the first installment in our new monthly series, Tbilisi Sketches, with illustrated dispatches covering local spots in Georgia’s capital. Contributor Andrew North is an artist and journalist based in Tbilisi who spent many years before that reporting from the Middle East and Asia.

“You’ve made me look angry,” laughs Marekhi Khatiashvili when we show our drawing of her making traditional Georgian bread in one of the tone bakeries in Tbilisi’s old city.

“You’re concentrating,” I reply. “I was trying to show how hard you work.”

It is incredibly hard work. Marekhi’s day begins at 4:30 a.m., when she and her co-worker Nona Khatiashvili (no relation) start making giant tubs of dough in the back of the low-ceilinged bakery, ready to be baked into the long, flat loaves of bread that Georgians call shoti. It’s a ritual of daily life here.

As they turn and press the heavy mix of flour, water, salt and yeast, it is almost up to their elbows. “Everything is done by hand,” says Nona. “That’s the special ingredient.”

The dough is then fashioned into long strips, and at 7 a.m. they bake the first batch in the tone (pronounced “tone-ay”), a circular, brick-lined oven dug into the floor with a gas or wood fire at the bottom. It’s a Georgian version of the tandoor used in many parts of Asia (the words are related, adopted and adapted during the country’s many years under Persian and Ottoman rule).

Leaning over the oven, the women stick the strips of dough to the inside walls. It’s not a job for anyone with a bad back. To reach the lower levels, they bend almost double into the oven, wedging their feet against a metal guard on the floor so they don’t fall in. Even in winter, they are soon sweating in the fierce heat welling up from the tone, built inside what used to be a small garage.

A television covered in a thin film of flour dust plays an Indian soap dubbed into Georgian.

The loaves are ready in minutes. With a long-handled hook in one hand and a kind of scraping tool in the other, they deftly prise each piece loose and flip them onto a rack.

And then there’s a customer at the window.

“Do you have any hot?” That’s often all they say.

Nona nods and asks how many he wants. He pays 1.20 Georgian lari (about 50 cents) for two loaves.

The same scene plays out across the country in thousands of other small, street-side bakeries tucked into basements, corners, front rooms and the spaces in between – the smell of the fresh shoti dangling temptingly in the air outside.

Relatives and friends often stop by, bringing children with them. With warm bread also comes hot gossip. Tone bakeries know most of their regular customers so they are often the local news agency.

But it’s relentless toil. Over several hours, I watch the rhythm of Georgian bread-making unfold, trying to keep up on my sketchpad. And they’ll be at it until 9 p.m. each night. But except when she is leaning over the oven, Marekhi keeps up a constant flow of jokes and banter.

They make an average of 600 loaves a day, many more on holidays. Three women work there in all, and they each do two weeks solid and then have a week off, returning to their homes in eastern Georgia.

“It’s a hard job,” they both agree, especially in summer when temperatures reach nearly 40C (about 104F).  But they say they earn far more here than if they stayed in their home villages.

“This is blessed job,” says Nona. “Like wine, bread is a gift from God.”

And then there’s another voice at the window:

“Is there any hot?”

The post Tbilisi Sketches appeared first on Culinary Backstreets.

Editor’s note: Tbilisi was a new addition to Culinary Backstreets this year, and as we look back on all the great eating we did in 2015, we can’t help but notice that so much of it took place in the city’s Sololaki area.

There’s a typecast in Georgia that when somebody wants to go into business, they open up a khinkali restaurant. There is a logic to that. About a million people live in Tbilisi, a city built impetuously along the hilly banks of the Mtkvari River. And the adoration every single one of these people has for this boiled dumpling is so reverent, it is as if they see Jesus and his disciples feasting on a steaming platter of kalakuri khinkali for the Last Supper as they bite a hole into the dumpling and slurp its tasty broth.

The drawback to this blind devotion to the delicious khinkali and its orthodox kin – kababi, khachapuri and mtsvadi – is that variations of these dishes are often considered heretic. Georgians have obdurate taste buds, which pose a challenge to progressive cooks. Restaurants are often compelled to include traditional Georgian fare on their international menus to keep customers. When Chinese restaurants first popped up in Tbilisi a dozen years ago, they were obliged to serve a basket of bread on each table because for Georgians, the concept of a meal without bread is simply demented.

Old habits die hard, but they are not invincible, thanks to the unsavory ambassador of American gastronomy, Ronald McDonald. Mickey D’s opening in Tbilisi in 1999 was a defining moment in Georgian food culture, not because of the introduction of fast food, which was already here, but because it offered the first authentic and relatively affordable alternative to Georgian food. Chinese, Italian, French and Indian restaurants soon emerged, changing the culinary landscape of the city.

Meanwhile, Georgians who had left the country in the tumultuous 1990s had started to return, inspired by Western concepts of democracy, business and food. While Tbilisi’s Old Town has been renovated to offer the growing number of tourists what they expect from Georgia, a neighboring district has been slowly regenerating culinary life in the dormant quarter with a new approach to Georgian cooking and changing the way Georgians appreciate food. Welcome to Sololaki, Tbilisi’s up-and-coming restaurant district.

It is said that the name Sololaki comes from sululakh, Arabic for “canal,” which the Arabs had built long ago to water some nearby gardens, but the neighborhood we know was built in the 19th and early 20th centuries by Georgian and European architects. Communism, earthquakes and economic turmoil following independence in 1991 have all taken a toll on old bourgeois Sololaki, which had been slowly decaying. However, the growing presence of new kinds of restaurants and cafés is turning the humble district into an epicure’s paradise.

Although technically in Tbilisi’s Old Town but located in a 19th-century building on the über-charming Gudiashvili Square, Pur Pur was the first restaurant in the area to offer European-style dishes in a homey atmosphere. Its cool, urbane interior design has become a template for hipster cafés and restaurants throughout the city.

On the opposite side of the square is renowned local chef Tekuna Gachechiladze’s laboratory and restaurant, Culinarium, known for serving a mean Asian Sunday brunch and mixing the best Bloody Mary in the Caucasus. Several blocks away, she has been blowing minds and palates at her Cafe Littera, located in the old mansion once owned by David Sarajishvili, the man who brought European-style brandy to Georgia.

On the other end of Sololaki, at the bottom of the road that takes you up Mtatsminda Mountain, is Shavi Lomi (Black Lion), also designed by Pur Pur’s creator, Guga Kotetishvili. Its hearty original takes on regional cuisine have made it one of Tbilisi’s most popular restaurants.

Like any good wine bar, Vino Underground, located in the liver of Sololaki, is a place of learning. That’s because everybody connected to the bar is passionate about wine, naturally made kvevri vintages in particular. Seven winemaker owners offer around 100 family-produced wines and delicious appetizers to go with them. Vino Underground is not a restaurant, unless you’re hungry for wine.

A three-minute walk from the liver is a typical neighborhood courtyard that is the heart of the district. This is Ezo, an exceedingly child-friendly place that is dedicated to making “honest food,” just like Mom’s. Here, children are encouraged to go bonkers with a box of toys designated just for them, while parents indulge in juicy brick-sized pork chops, fried potatoes that were dug out of the side of a Svanetian mountain and delicious organic homemade wine from a Kakheti vineyard. At Ezo, you sometimes you forget you’re at a restaurant.

Sololaki is not just becoming the spot for culinary innovation, it is also becoming a place of international flavors, with everything from Italian to Korean and even Scandinavian eateries popping up in the district.

Tbilisi is no longer a one-menu town reliant on Quarter Pounders for diversion. And today you would be hard-pressed to find a basket of bread at a Chinese restaurant. Still, with a growing number of dining possibilities available, we have not forgotten how fortunate we are to live somewhere where we can sit down at a clunky wooden table, bite into a piping-hot kalakuri khinkali, suck down the spicy broth and gobble the dumpling down as juice drips down our wrists. Georgia has always been a country for food lovers and in Sololaki, the food keeps getting better and better.

The post Best Bites 2015 appeared first on Culinary Backstreets.

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment in our monthly series of illustrated dispatches covering local spots in and around Georgia’s capital. Contributor Andrew North is an artist and journalist based in Tbilisi who spent many years before that reporting from the Middle East and Asia.

Tbilisi stores and markets are festooned now with distinctive sausage-shaped candies called churchkhela, ready for New Year celebrations and then Orthodox Christmas on January 7. They are a very traditional Georgian specialty, usually homemade from grape juice thickened with flour and nuts.

But those aren’t the only ingredients you need to make churchkhela – they also require some serious muscle. How could it be otherwise for a food created by Georgian warriors as a sugar hit that wouldn’t perish on a long march? It was, in other words, one of the world’s earliest energy bars.

“We still do it the same way as our ancestors,” says Khatuna Saalishvili, as we watch her and her husband, Temuri, start the process in their backyard in the village of Kisiskhevi. A wood fire heats a large metal cauldron filled with the mix of grape juice and flour known as tatara. The steam shines in the winter sun. The Saalishvilis’ daughter, Ani, visiting from Tbilisi with her little baby, and their neighbors take turns stirring the pot with a large wooden spoon, as big as a woodcutter’s axe. Churchkhela making is a communal affair.

After simmering several hours, the tatara is so dense it almost holds the spoon upright. But as she lifts it and watches cinnamon-colored globs slide back into the pot, Khatuna wants it still thicker. “Another half an hour,” she says, and strides off.

Faces tighten. There’s a good-natured grumble from the volunteers. Even if Khatuna is happy in an open-necked shirt and slippers, everyone else is freezing.

Temuri comes over to give the mix another turn.

“Let’s go,” he says theatrically, plunging the spoon into the wax-like mixture and working it like an oar in a heavy swell. He is a big man, arms and shoulders molded by years of hefting sacks of grapes and wine barrels. But barely 30 seconds later, he has to give it a rest. We give it a try too. Mixing cement is easy by comparison.

Finally, the moment arrives. The tatara is ready – and an orchestra of hands springs to life.

First Khatuna and Temuri’s, lifting the heavy pot off the fire. Other hands lay a wooden plank to catch the drips and chairs to serve as a makeshift drying rack. Another pair arranges strings of walnuts and hazelnuts on a tray, ready to be covered with the sticky grape mixture.

They push each string of nuts under with a spoon, before hanging them on long sticks to dry. As each rod fills up, Temuri suspends them between the chairs.

“Only 20 per stick,” he shouts, “or they won’t fit.”

“I’ll put however many I like,” Khatuna shoots back. The ribbing doesn’t interrupt the workflow, and soon there are hundreds of churchkhela hanging from sticks. They will be dried for 10 days in the family loft and then taken to Tbilisi to be sold for 3 to 5 lari (US$1.20 to $2) a piece. The reward for the waiting is the sweet, burnt scrapings at the bottom of the pot, and everyone crowds round. Churchkhela making is done for another year.

(illustrations by Andrew North, video by Nikoloz Bezhanishvili and Giorgi Lomsadze)

The post Tbilisi Sketches appeared first on Culinary Backstreets.

While much of the West celebrates Christmas in an orgy of shopping for presents that climaxes after a single dinner, Georgians commemorate the season with a 30-day binge of feasts that pretty much begins on December 17, Saint Barbara’s Day (Barbaroba), and peters out by January 19, the Orthodox Epiphany (Natlisgeba). Unlike Americans, Georgians don’t consume stuff for the holidays – they annihilate food. The best, if not most chaotic, place to stock up on victuals is the Dezertirebi Bazroba (“Deserter’s Bazaar”). Located near Tbilisi’s central train station, this raw, disorganized, 2,000-square-meter warren of unprocessed agrarian pabulum is the city’s largest open-air market.

Open year-round, Dezertirebi is not for the fainthearted, particularly as New Year’s Eve, the climax of the season, draws near. The ever-anarchic Tbilisi traffic becomes 5 square kilometers of packed, honking lunacy. People shuffle elbow-to-elbow through entanglements of tables stacked with dead piglets, florescent mandarin oranges, lime-green veggies, bloody fish and freshly plucked village chickens and turkeys, which will be smothered in satsivi, a delectable walnut-based sauce served especially during the holiday season. Sparkly holiday tinsel flaps in the breeze next to hog heads dangling off hooks, while shouts of “khachapuri, shoti, cigaretti” and prices per kilo fill the air along with the biting sting of melting plastic and rubbish from the little fires hucksters build for warmth.

The bazaar is called “dezertirebi” because in the 1920s army deserters sold their weapons here. In 2007, the city demolished the old Soviet-era main building, sending many traders deeper into the crannies of surrounding structures. When the new building went up in 2012, few traders returned. However, the earthiness of that open market – where impossible mountains of locally milled flour stood next to teetering stacks of stinky cheese wheels across the aisle from herbs and spice vendors – can be found in an adjacent brick building called the “Central Bazaar.”

This year, we made it to the bazaar just before the New Year’s crunch. Police had blocked much of the traffic coming into the bazaar and the stress level was low, moods were light and the weather was a sunny, pleasant 9 degrees C (49 degrees F). Between a butcher with a makeshift market in the back of his van and a cabbage salesman with a van full of heads stood a strong, clear-eyed man with his wine in 5-liter plastic bottles on a table. He was from Sighnaghi, the heart of Georgia’s wine region, and he held a bottle up to the sun to show off the wine’s clear, amber color. For 15 lari a bottle (roughly $6), it was a deal hard to pass up. And his method of persuasion was indomitable: “Take my number. Call me. Come, you will be my guest. We will drink my wine and I will make mtsvadi,” he said.

Location: corner of Abastumani and Tsinamdzgvrishvili
Hours: sunrise to sunset

(photos by Paul Rimple)

The post Chaotic Holidays to You appeared first on Culinary Backstreets.

Tbilisi’s Vake Park district is an upscale neighborhood full of designer cafés and fancy-looking Georgian-European restaurants offering mediocre grub at prices that complement the black SUVs and silver Mercedes that crowd the streets. Sure, you can find a good place that serves up the typical tasty Georgian menu at a fair price. But for original Georgian cooking with particular attention to fresh ingredients and the process of putting them together so that all the individual flavors explode in your mouth, look no further than Citron Plus.

This intimate restaurant is the creation of 48-year-old Ramaz Gemiashvili, a self-taught chef who started baking in the 1990s to supplement the income he wasn’t making as an actor in the famed Marjanishvili Theater. “Back then, actors didn’t really get paid, so I decided to make cakes to help support my family,” Ramaz said.

In 2003, he moved out of his home kitchen and opened Kafe Literaturuli, one of Tbilisi’s first proper coffeehouses, which was patronized by local writers, journalists and artists and featured his delicious home-baked desserts. As Kafe Literaturuli became an established institution with five locations across the city, Ramaz, who had by then put acting behind him, turned his attentions to cooking and began tampering with traditional Georgian food. He sold his Literaturuli shares in 2013 and opened Citron in Tbilisi’s Old Town and then the smaller Citron Plus in Vake Park last summer.

Both restaurants share the same distinctive menu, where you can find traditional dishes like Megrelian kharcho, a chicken stew in a tomato-walnut sauce, and tolma, Georgia’s take on stuffed grape leaves. But because each dish is prepared to order, you can taste the layers of flavors as they roll down your tongue. Ajapsandali, a vegetable stew of eggplant, bell peppers and onions, is typically an overcooked goulash of veggies. Citron, however, is careful to preserve the natural zest of each vegetable by sautéing the dish just right.

“The most important thing is the ingredients; everything must be fresh,” Ramaz asserted. “Other restaurants heat up what they have already made. Even our kharcho is made to order.” That stovetop scrutiny is evident in the tenderness of the chicken in the kharcho, while you can taste the present tense in the deep, nutty sauce.

Like other local culinary innovators, Ramaz sees Georgian food as the natural byproduct of the country’s mixed cultural legacy. (The Soviets, he declares, damaged the evolution of Georgian cooking by imposing their comestible brand on each republic.) Citron’s menu has surprises inspired by Ramaz’s experience cooking at an Italian restaurant in Israel. He reconsidered the west Georgian soul food staple of elarji, an elastic porridge of cornmeal and sulguni cheese plopped steaming on a little plate.

“It’s really just polenta, so I serve it like Italian polenta,” he explained. But he makes his polenta with smoked sulguni, cuts it into cubes and lightly fries it. The smoky-tasting side dish is a perfect companion to the kharcho – or anything else on the menu, for that matter.

Perhaps Citron’s greatest transgression to traditionalists is its reduction of the khinkali, Georgia’s iconic lemon-sized dumpling, into a cuddlesome bite-sized ravioli substitute, stuffed with sulguni or ground meat and served with a pesto-cream sauce. In a country distinguished by its assertive flavors, these nippled ravioli strike the perfect balance between light and rich, Europe and Asia.

Ramaz continues to play with desserts and offers an ample selection of tarts and cakes. It isn’t easy to find authentic cheesecake in Tbilisi, but Citron’s gozinaki (honey and walnut) cheesecake is as delicious as a first kiss. And non-smokers will appreciate the smoke-free environment, a trend that is only slowly catching on in Tbilisi.

One thing guests should keep in mind is that cooking to order takes time. If your stomach is growling, you’d better continue down the street to a fast-food joint. Citron is for people who aren’t in a hurry. The payoff is lip-smacking exaltation that left us wondering if we really had eaten Georgian food because, although we were stuffed, we floated out the door back home.

Citron Plus
Address: 8 Bazaleti St., Vake Park
Telephone: +995 598 69 64 15
Hours: 9am – 1am

Citron
Address: 7 Bambis Rigi, Old Tbilisi
Telephone: +995 553 53 01 26
Hours: 9am – 1am

(photos by Paul Rimple)

The post Citron Plus appeared first on Culinary Backstreets.

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment in our series of illustrated dispatches covering local spots in and around Georgia’s capital. Contributor Andrew North is an artist and journalist based in Tbilisi who spent many years before that reporting from the Middle East and Asia.

So it’s thanks to Genghis Khan that we find ourselves in a Tbilisi restaurant kitchen eight centuries later, watching chef Lena Ezieshvili make khinkali, Georgia’s famous meat dumplings. That’s one thought that skitters through my head as I try to follow her wink-quick hands folding circles of dough around dollops of meat and herbs before neatly pinching them off at the top into that distinctive khinkali shape.

The Great Khan’s cavalry left a lot more than destruction behind: a pragmatic respect for different religions, for one thing, and a trail of dumplings. From Mongolia’s buuz to Afghanistan’s gently spiced mantu, you can follow this trail westwards along the Silk Road through the Caucasus to Turkey. Of course, it wasn’t only Mongol horsemen who first tried boiling or steaming dough filled with meat or vegetables. Tibet may have beaten them to it with momos. But the Mongols certainly helped to spread the idea.

The khinkali, the modern-day Great Khan of Georgian cuisine, is generally believed to have originated in the isolated mountain hamlets of Khevsureti, where the Caucasus mountain range borders Chechnya. What’s known as the khevsuruli variety is usually made with minced beef or lamb and pork, mixed with onions, chili, coriander and cumin.

That’s the specialty of the fantastically named Sofia Melnikova’s Fantastic Douqan, the café-restaurant where Lena works. Tucked in the ezo, or courtyard, of Tbilisi’s Literature Museum, it’s a culinary and cultural oasis, sustained by a constant flow of khinkali and other traditional Georgian dishes.

Lena reckons she makes an average of 500 khinkali a day, sometimes with a mushroom filling instead of meat. With customers often ordering dozens at a time, most restaurants now use a machine to make their khinkali. But “we make all ours by hand,” says Lena, “fresh for each order.”

I watch as she shapes 12 meat khinkali and then tips them into boiling water for a few minutes. The only thing she ever changes is the proportion of meat, adding more pork “to make them juicier.” Usually, it’s about one-third beef, two-thirds pork.

In khinkali’s journey from the mountains to the lowlands, shocking innovations have occurred over the years. Herbs like parsley have been added, and this variety, known as kalakuri (meaning “urban”), is now more common in Tbilisi. In some places, you can even find them filled with potatoes or cheese.

But Sofia Melnikova’s is a place for khinkali traditionalists – where any talk of changing the filling is sacrilege. (And if you’re new here, don’t think of trying to use a fork. You eat khinkali with your hands.) I venture to ask Lena if she would make khinkali filled with potato. She shakes her head and turns back to making the next batch. “That’s not khinkali.”

Sofia Melnikova’s Fantastic Douqan
Address: 22 Revaz Tabukashvili St. (behind the Literature Museum), off Rustaveli
Telephone: +995 592 68 11 66
Hours: noon-2am

Note: You have to go around the back of the museum to reach Sofia Melnikova’s Fantastic Douqan. It is open independently of the Literature Museum.  

The post Tbilisi Sketches appeared first on Culinary Backstreets.

In Tbilisi, we have mornings when we wake up wrinkled and dehydrated, and as we lie in bed knuckling the sleep from our eyes, we hear an all too familiar chorus beckoning us to “bite me, slurp me, gobble me down….” That is khinkali singing, and when you hear the melody, your day has been cast. You can forget about work and responsibilities.

We used to fritter away our afternoons with a platter of khinkali at Pasanauri, but when it changed owners and attitude and our beloved waitress Irma packed her bags, it was clear an era had passed. A period of pretty good khinkali at pretty good restaurants followed until we asked local filmmaker and fellow gastromaniac Levan Kitia where he goes for khinkali.

“Zakhar Zakharich,” he said without hesitation. “I love their lamb khinkali. I don’t think anybody in Tbilisi makes them with lamb, and they make them entirely by hand, mountain-style.”

The restaurant is located under the Dry Bridge flea market near the Mtkvari River and is named after a benevolent late-19th-century restaurateur who kept a table in his chain of dukanis (taverns) reserved to feed poor people for free. It is a legacy the restaurant’s owners convey through the care and consideration they put into the entire food-making process. In a city with hundreds of restaurants offering more or less the same menu, those are the details that make all the difference.

Khinkali, which originated in the high Caucasus, are traditionally stuffed with lamb or mutton, but down here in the lowlands, pork or a mixture of pork and beef is the norm. And because a typical Georgian restaurant can sell thousands of labor-intensive khinkali a day, the dough is machine-mixed almost everywhere you go. Zakhar Zakharich is one of only two restaurants we know of in Tbilisi that mix the dough by hand (the other being Sofia Melnikova’s Fantastic Douqan), which makes for a stickier and fluffier khinkali. The place employs four people just to mix the dough, and on an average day they make about 1,500 khinkali.

While our plan was simply to see if the khinkali was all that it was cracked up to be, we found too many distractions on a menu full of temptations. In addition to the conventional khashi (tripe), kharcho (beef and rice) and chikhirtma (chicken) soups, Zakhar Zakharich also prepares chanaki (mutton and eggplant), tatariakhni (beef broth and greens), piti (mutton broth and peas) and ukha (a fish soup they make with Norwegian salmon).

We had to order chkmeruli, a four-consonant impossibility that translates to chicken baked in a heap of garlic. It is a simple, yet luscious dish we order to measure a restaurant’s quality. Is the chicken skimpy, tough and dry? Is it over- or undercooked? Or has the cook tried to hide the chicken’s age under a kilo of garlic and a basin of cream? You know Zakhar Zakharich has nailed it when all you hear at the table is the murmur of “yummm” and see a growing collection of bones sucked clean and dry.

One key to their toothsome success is that they buy their meat daily from trusted butchers and never, ever use day-old or frozen meat. Moreover, they offer wine from their own vineyard in eastern Georgia and distill their own chacha, a deliciously potent elixir akin to grappa.

As for the khinkali, Kitia highly recommended the lamb, but Zakhar Zakharich also has beef, herb-infused beef and pork kalakuri, as well as mushroom, potato, sulguni and cottage cheese varieties. Khinkali is a serious dish ordered by the dozen. Ask for fewer than five and the waitperson won’t even say “no.” They will just ice you with a click of the tongue and an expression reserved for utter morons. We took a gamble and asked for three of each and our waitress didn’t bat an eye. She returned with plump fig-sized dumplings, a bit smaller than most places serve, but the proportion of stuffing was perfect. Some joints cut corners and skimp on the meat, a telling sign of a lack of character. The mushroom khinkali were packed with wild mushrooms and fresh coriander and tasted nothing short of earthly divinity. Likewise the meat khinkali – including the lamb ones – which were so tender and succulent that we even ate the dumplings’ doughy nipples.

The post The Khinkali Chronicles, Part 2 appeared first on Culinary Backstreets.

Chickens cooling off and on display, upside down in Tbilisi’s central Bazaar.

The post Fowl Play in Tbilisi’s Central Bazaar appeared first on Culinary Backstreets.

This well-stocked spice stand is found at Tbilisi’s Deserter’s Bazaar, the city’s largest open-air market which constitutes a central part of our newly-launched walk.

The post A Spiced-Up Affair at Tbilisi’s Deserter’s Bazaar appeared first on Culinary Backstreets.

Story

While you can find the simple stolovaya menu all over Georgia, particularly at roadhouses along the highway to the Black Sea, the workingman’s cafeteria is an institution disappearing from the Tbilisi landscape. Not that anybody’s complaining. Few people shed tears at the dematerialization of anything that represents the county’s Soviet past and stolovayas don’t rate highly in a country that takes its dining seriously. However, there is one bastion in Tbilisi’s Didube district worth noting, and not just for its retro value.

Located in the Coca-Cola bottling plant is Sasadilo Coca-Cola, a raw, no-frills, family-owned stolovaya that the late Gia Aptsiauri opened in 1995, just two years after Coke began operations in Tbilisi. It’s a busy place in a bustling neighborhood of workshops, auto repair garages and the city’s lumber and iron yards. The factory employees and local working-class stiffs make up most of the customers who jockey towards the counter – Georgians do not possess the queuing chromosome – to place their lunch orders, which are relayed back to the open kitchen in shouts, much like the iconic Greek guys at Chicago’s Billy Goat Tavern. But people do not come here for the novelty of cacophony. They come because the food is honestly good.

Gia Aptsiauri’s brothers, Vekuia and Badri, are hands-on owners, taking orders and manning the cash register. The menu board above them sets the price of most dishes at six lari – roughly US$2. Vekuia points at his brother’s shrine on a shelf and says Gia was an experienced cook whose recipes come from their native Khevsureti, a region high in the Caucasus Mountains. He insists we try their garlic-basted boiled pig’s feet and recommends their khashi – tripe soup and pig knuckles in a milky stock – but we have no hangovers to nurse and settle on a less ambitious order of kabob and kharcho.

Georgia is renowned for grand feasts, monumental toastmaking and the consumption of gallons of wine in one long sitting, but the stolovaya is the other side of the gastronomic coin. For one thing, nobody drinks wine here. Two guys at the table next to us are sharing a small bottle of cognac, which in Georgia is a perfectly acceptable lunch beverage. One guy fills their glasses and the other mutters a short obligatory toast and they clink. Meanwhile, at the end of the room, five guys are plucking steaming khinkali off a platter and smoking cigarettes at the same time. It has been the same routine, hairstyles, clothes and food for over 20 years.

In a few quick minutes a waitress delivers two steaming bowls of kharcho – the prefect antidote to a cold, gray winter day. This is not the nut-based Megrelian recipe, but a spicy, rich broth of herbs, rice and fist-sized chunks of beef on the bone. It’s hard to get bad kharcho in Georgia; the trick is finding great kharcho. We dip our spoons, and from the first sip it’s clear this is no ordinary soup. It’s a drug, and we don’t come up for air until the kabobs arrive, and that’s only because we want to see if they’re as intoxicating. They’re wrapped in Armenian lavash, a thin oval flatbread. The meat is a mixture of ground pork, beef, spices and herbs. In theory they’re quite simple to prepare, they’re also really easy to mess up. They can be salty or bland, overcooked and rubbery, or undercooked and raw.

The Aptsiauri brothers serve a serious kabob – juicy, jumbo and finger-licking dangerous – but it is their kharcho that is so good, it should be illegal.

Location

The post Sasadilo Coca-Cola appeared first on Culinary Backstreets.

This steaming serving of chkmeruli (Georgian garlic chicken) is guaranteed to keep vampires away for a week. One may encounter a tasty (and protective) dish like this on our Tbilisi walk.

The post Vampire-Thwarting Chkmeruli in Tbilisi appeared first on Culinary Backstreets.