Tbilisi

Ankara: Turkish Pioneer

We were living in an urban cave: a dark, cramped, one-room ground-floor apartment next to the Marjanishvili Theater in Plekhanov. At 60 bucks a month we could hardly complain – after all, there were greater things to grumble about. The year was 2002, and electricity was a capricious luxury that always seemed to go off the moment you came home only to come back on the moment you went to bed. And there were the cops, whose sole duty was to extort money from people. Occasionally, we would even gripe about dinner. “Georgian, again?” There were several greasyspoons along Aghmashenebeli, our main drag, which was often buried under a bone-rattling cacophony of gasoline-powered generators. The menus were all the same, so we would go to one place for their shkmeruli, another for ostri and the famed El Depo for khinkali. They were fine, but we missed variety.

Tbilisi

Winter Greens in Tbilisi

Named after the soldiers who fled the Czar’s army in the early 19th century and sold their guns and equipment there, the Deserter’s Bazaar today is the main food source of most of Tbilisi’s restaurants and many families seeking the best bargains in fresh produce, like the winter greens and veggies we spotted on a recent Old Market walk.

Tbilisi

Sulico Wine Bar: Soul Cellar

Happiness comes in all forms, but according to Aristotle’s scale there are four distinct levels to this particular emotion – say, for example, waking up to a glorious sunny day (laetus), getting a special discount from your local green grocer (felix) or watching your dog do its business in a sinister neighbor’s yard (beatitudo). Looking out the window, the snow-capped Caucasus along the horizon on this bright day, our eyes scan the city and settle over our own neighborhood of Vera, below. We sigh a sensual “yes” and nod smugly with our arms crossed because now there is a place in the hood where we can experience each of Aristotle’s levels of happiness in one splendid sitting.

Tbilisi

Sulico Wine Bar: Soul Cellar

Happiness comes in all forms, but according to Aristotle’s scale there are four distinct levels to this particular emotion – say, for example, waking up to a glorious sunny day (laetus), getting a special discount from your local green grocer (felix) or watching your dog do its business in a sinister neighbor’s yard (beatitudo). Looking out the window, the snow-capped Caucasus along the horizon on this bright day, our eyes scan the city and settle over our own neighborhood of Vera, below. We sigh a sensual “yes” and nod smugly with our arms crossed because now there is a place in the hood where we can experience each of Aristotle’s levels of happiness in one splendid sitting.

Tbilisi

Keti's Bistro: Nouvelle Tbilisi

Going out for a Georgian dinner in Tbilisi used to be a predictable, belt-popping affair. There were very few variations on the menus of most restaurants, all of which offered mtsvadi (roast pork), kababi (roast pork-beef logs), ostri (beef stew) and kitri-pomidori (tomato-cucumber) salad. To open a restaurant and call it Georgian without these staple dishes would have been as ludicrous as a coffeehouse with no coffee. In the past several years, however, young local cooks have been expanding the rich possibilities of Georgian cuisine to both much applause and a lot of finger wagging for blaspheming traditional recipes.

Tbilisi

Hitting the Sauce: Satsivi Season in Tbilisi

There was no wind and we were in the middle of the Black Sea on a bright summer day, puttering across the deep blue expanse in a chaika, a small wooden Cossack war ship that its Ukrainian sail-ors had equipped with a diesel motor. We were two days out from Yalta, and our captain, Myron, was looking eastward towards our destination of Batumi, his blue eyes glazed in a dreamy state of longing. “Ah, Georgia. Satsivi,” he sighed. “Satsivi,” he repeated sensually to Roman, the first mate, as if it were the name of a beckoning siren. “I cannot wait.” I was impressed he didn’t sob for khinkali and khachapuri like everyone else. But still, I had to quickly snuff out his reverie.

Tbilisi

Best Bites 2018: Tbilisi

Editor’s note: We’re celebrating another year of excellent backstreets eating by taking a look back at our favorite restaurants and dishes of 2018. Starting things off is a dispatch from our Tbilisi bureau chief Paul Rimple. It was a wet, cold, gray autumn day, and we were shopping for household stuff at the East Point Mall, close to the airport, where we built up an appetite. Our home was being renovated, we had no kitchen, and the mall had a food court. We understood nothing here would taste good – the sushi, the pizza, the Asian noodles with a 30 minute wait – but were not prepared for the hideousness that passed as burgers and a chicken wrap from a world-renowned fast-food enterprise. “Of all the good places to eat at in this city,” my partner bemoaned, dropping her half-devoured chicken wrap on the plastic tray and pushing it away.