When our friend applied for a chef gig at the cooking department of a northern California community college, a board of evaluators gave him a pair of chicken breasts, a frugal selection of ingredients and said, “Create something.” He assessed his workspace and smiled. He saw white wine, chicken stock, butter, shallots and plenty of garlic. He dusted the breasts in flour and hocus-pocus, finished off the dish with a five-fingered pinch of chopped parsley and got the job. Garlic chicken works. Its humble transcendence has conquered the world over – and the more garlic, the merrier. In provincial France they roast a chicken with no less than 40 cloves of garlic for poulet aux 40 gousses d’ail, while Oaxacans make pollo oaxaqueño con orégano y ajo with 30 cloves.

Tbilisi is a city of bread. This staple food has a permanent residency on every kitchen sideboard and a space on every modern table, and has been consumed in Georgia since the beginning of the 6th millennium BC. The demand for fresh bread has produced bakeries throughout the city; multiple in each area and sometimes as many as three along one street. A Tibilsian walking down the street carrying puri (bread) tucked under their arm should really be as emblematic as the baguette-bearing Parisian.

For a while, French-Georgian fusion restaurant Métis, which opened in 2017, seemed to be the only place in town to get snails, served in their iconic snail khinkali. We took several trips to Akhaltsikhe and other areas of Samtskhe-Javakheti, asking for snails, and were always told the season was wrong or to look somewhere else. Then, in April 2021, Chef Guram Bagdoshvili added his riff on Meskhetian snails to the menu of his Georgian-Asian restaurant Chveni, and, with the recent addition of snail khinkali to their menu as well, today there are at least three snail dishes easily available to the avid Tbilisi gastropod consumer.