Tbilisi

Best Bites 2017: 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 2017. Starting things off is a dispatch from our Tbilisi bureau chief Paul Rimple: In 2001, a chic fashion designer opened up a snazzy café in the Vake Park building we were living. The low quadratic furnishings were not made for comfort, but were perfect for posing with your nose in the air and a cigarette between your fingers. It was the only cafe in this part of town and lucky us, it was downstairs.

Tbilisi

Dried Fruits Sweeten A Dreary Winter’s Day

Churchkhelas, Georgia’s traditional homemade energy bar made of grape must, nuts and flour, and dried and candied fruits add a burst of color at the Deserter’s Bazaar in Tbilisi. While the churchkhelas and dried fruits are Georgian, the candied fruits generally come from Central Asia.

Tbilisi

Aripana: All Over the Map

We spent the summer in Georgia’s Shida Kartli region, a vast expanse of fertile terrain in the heart of the country that we have fallen crazy in love with. One day, over a glass of local Chinuri wine, we wondered aloud, “Every other region in the country has signature dishes, but what about Kartli? What are its signature dishes?” We asked our neighbors and got a lot of shoulder shrugs. Shota, a 65-year-old contractor, re-called his grandmother’s soups. “They had fruit,” he said. Seventy-year-old Maro said she too ate fruit soups as a child. Thus began our plan to dig up forgotten Kartli recipes, someday.

Tbilisi

Tbilisoba: Harvest Bacchanalia for the Whole Family

When it comes to fragrances, nothing makes you stop in your tracks and moan in delight more than the redolence of mtsvadi roasting on the coals of grape vine trimmings. It’s the juicy sizzling fat basting the chunks of skewered pork that clinches it and makes whiffing the browning meat just as good as eating it. For one October weekend every year, the entire center of Tbilisi is immersed in wafts of barbecue from perhaps hundreds of hot grills, called makhali, as men, teary-eyed in billows of smoke, turn the skewers in pop-up sidewalk picnic parties. This is part of an annual event called Tbilisoba, a kind of Georgian Oktoberfest, but much cooler.

Tbilisi

Making Moonshine in Kakheti

An important part of our chacha journey is making sure that the moonshine still is sealed with a putty made of ash, earth and water.

Tbilisi

Harvest Week: Bluesy Kakhetian Wine

The Telavi-Gurjaani Highway is a two-lane ribbon that meanders across the fertile Alazani Valley, linking sedate east Georgian hamlets together like a string of old lights. Not a lot happens out here; SUVs and new sedans speed past lethargic jalopies and donkeys pulling carts of sticks, while men sit under the shade of the trees watching the world go by. The vibe changes in September, though, when the slumbering villages spark to life. It’s harvest time, and the rural road is suddenly busy with cars, dump trucks and tractors pulling trailers – all either packed with grapes or one their way to the fields to pick them. This is Georgia’s largest wine region and nearly every family here has some stake in the winemaking process.

Tbilisi

Megrelebi Manoni: Get Your Megrelian On

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.