Don't Go Hungry in Tbilisi's Old Town

The courtyard at Ezo, our end destination

April 20, 2017
 
We met our guide, Kristo, near the Sioni Church in old town Tbilisi. The church is the oldest church in Tbilisi—a church dates to this site from the 300s, the current church from sometime in the 1700s—and the most important to the city. From here, we could look up into the hills and see the statue of the Mother of Tbilisi on the ridge-line holding out her grapes for guests in one hand and a sword in the other—for unwelcome guests?—the white marble of the statue glowing in the sunshine. We were ready for our Tbilisi food tour with Culinary Backstreets, ready to eat Georgian breads and sweets and dumplings and to drink Georgian wines and their native grappa liquor called chacha.

 Kristo first brought us to a bakery near the church, down a stairway with only a small sign to mark the way, and only in Georgian script which is to our eyes indecipherable. We entered a basement to the yeasty smell of baking bread. Kristo explained that Georgians don’t really eat what we consider breakfast food in the West, but will usually only have some bread and maybe some matsoni, or Georgian yogurt. Behind the counter, a baker stood over a cylindrical oven watching the bread bake. Seeing us, he came over and opened the counter so we could come back and look at the oven. He demonstrated how they stick the dough to the side of the hot oven and used a long hook to pull out the bread as it finished baking.

We took a loaf of bread to try. It was good with a crisp crust and light flaky interior, salty and yeasty. Next, Kristo took us to a small shop attached to the church where they sold homemade foods: honeys and churchkhela, the Georgian treat of walnuts dipped in grape juice and dried to a candy—Kristo called this the Georgian Snickers bar. They even sold homemade chacha. We were looking for matsoni, but on this day they were out, so Kristo asked for the Georgian version of cottage cheese topped with some sour cream and honey and a string of churchkhela, and we went outside and sat on a stone ledge to eat with the sun shining and the bees buzzing around the flowers in the lilac bushes nearby.

Table of churchkhela at the Deserters Bazaar

All the food was delicious; we ate some more bread and our little cups of cottage cheese and Kristo explained to us how Georgians traditionally shop for food. They have grocery stores now, and we would later go to the Deserters’ Bazaar which is the main market, but in Georgia, buying good quality food is largely about who you know, about relationships that often go back generations. So Kristo’s grandparents would buy large containers of matsoni from their supplier every week, exchanging containers, and this would be their breakfast when they had it. She said matsoni especially was the super food that leads Georgians to live long lives. Hearing so much about the matsoni, it was a shame not to get to try some. I imagined a thick, Greek yogurt, a little sour but creamy and maybe lightly sweetened with some natural Georgian honey—some of the best honey in the world—from one of the unmarked plastic jars in the little shop by the church we had just visited.

Often the tastiest of foods have no name and no recipe. They are passed down through time, through generations, over the course of hundreds of years until nobody understands anymore why something is done a certain way, only that it must be done that way and is better for it. I had this sense of Georgian cuisine. They claim to be the birthplace of wine and have in fact proved wine to have been produced in the country for 8000 years—this is even advertised at immigration control in the Tbilisi airport. They still make wine in Georgia in clay pots buried in the ground as they always have. Small-scale agriculture still exists in the country—they are just now waking to the potentials of agro-tourism—and almost everybody owns a small plot of grapes they harvest and some walnut trees.

Kristo is more in tune with the current state of Georgian agriculture than most. She owns an organic restaurant in the city—the restaurant is called Ezo—that gets supplied largely through small farmers from the different regions of Georgia. It’s a very exciting project. They even have their own farm now and hope to start stocking their own produce soon, and they host a farmer’s market at the restaurant every week with the extra produce they don’t need for the restaurant.

The flavors of Georgia at the Deserters' Bazaar

From the church, we caught a cab to take us to the Deserters’ Bazaar, the main market in central Tbilisi, where farmers come and set up stands to sell their produce. The bazaar was quieter than usual this day because we were less than a week after Easter and all of Georgia had been feasting for the past few days; but Kristo was able to show us how most people set up their stalls on the outside of the market because the new building charges such high rents. We tried some spices: coriander and Georgian red pepper; and then we took a quick walk around the echoing interior where vendors tried to sell us fruit straight off the trucks from Turkey. In the next building we tasted some Georgian cheeses and dried fruit leather—like fruit roll-ups, made from fresh grape juice dried in a thin layer under the hot summer sun.

The market was interesting, but more of a curiosity: something to see because we must. But now we caught another cab to drive us back into town. The time had come for the real eating on our food quest. We were off in search of khinkali, or Georgian dumplings.

For those who have tried them, khinkali are one of the world’s wonders, filled with a tasty broth and succulent meat and flavored with the tastes of Georgia: coriander and tarragon, some red pepper and caraway seed. The dumplings are shaped by folding the dough together to form a handle, which is then put to use when eating.. Because there is a proper way to eat khinkali—first you pick up the dumpling by the handle or khvost as they call it in Russian—the “tail”; then, you take a bite from the rounded edge of one side of the dumpling to make a small hole from which you drink all the delicious broth before nibbling up the rest of the dumpling. It is a food as fun to eat as it is tasty and one of the highlights of Georgian cuisine.

At Zakhar Zakharich we ordered a plate of pickled vegetables, including jonjoli, a flower of a native bush that is one of the few edible flowers in the world. It had a tangy taste, made more so by the pickling process. We also ordered a plate of mixed herbs we were instructed to eat separate with a pinch of salt, and four different varieties of khinkali; also Nabeghlavi, a Georgian mineral water less well-known than Borjomi but, we were assured, better, and a couple shots of chacha. The varieties of khinkali were cheese, wild mushroom, lamb, and minced meat, and the wild mushroom was especially good. We came back the next night for more. We drank the chacha with a second lamb khinkali and left the restaurant with a nice buzz on our way to a Georgian wine tasting.

We walked from Zakhar Zakharich, holding our jackets in the afternoon heat, up to the Dry Bridge over the restaurant and through a flea market of historical knickknacks, amber necklaces, random oddments of kitchenware, and toys—relics of childhoods past. Through another park, booksellers lined the sidewalks and talked with people passing by. Up through the old town, we stopped at new restaurant Kristo has just opened, a wine bar with an open grill set up in a large room at the end of a stairway. The restaurant was cluttered as they were still working on setting things up with drills and pieces scattered just inside the door.

We continued on around another corner, down a side street on the edge of a construction site, stopping before a red door on an old stone building that said in hand drawn letters, “Vino Underground.” We went down the stairs to a large stone vault: an old wine cellar. Inside the air was cool and musty, and I put back on my jacket. We tried seven different varieties of Georgian wines, from crisp dry whites, to golden ambers, finishing with the famous Saperavi, a deep viscous red heavy on tobacco notes and the char of grilled meat.

The cellar at Vino Underground

We talked about Tbilisi and Georgia—where we should go during the rest of our trip. We talked about the wines. They were all delightful, all unique—in some we swore we could taste the clay notes from the pots used in the fermentation process. They ferment some white varieties with the skins, creating golden amber wines with robust flavor. Georgian wine is difficult to find outside of the country; though they have many producers and many different varieties they do not produce enough wine for mass export. Georgia remains a small country; a country that likes to drink its wine rather than ship it off to distant ports. For this reason, the only way to get an authentic tasting of Georgian wines is to visit, and Vino Underground is a good place to start. We determined to come back and purchase our favorite bottles before the end of our trip.

Some Georgian whites, both unique and delicious

To finish the tour, Kristo brought us to her restaurant in a courtyard set amidst a historic Tbilisi neighborhood: streets of dilapidated buildings with grand doorways and large glass windows set in ornate frames. Ezo is actually Georgian for courtyard. We stopped along the way to explore some of the buildings—Kristo is something of an enthusiast—and discuss Tbilisi architectural history. She showed us through the doorway of one to see an opulent stairway, wide and tall and curving upward. In this neighborhood before Soviet times lived the aristocracy of Tbilisi: merchants and other affluent families. They brought in Italian architects to design their homes, but the buildings were divided into communal housing during the Soviet period and have, I’m led to believe, been slowly crumbling now for decades.

Finally, we arrived at Kristo’s restaurant. She showed us around. The restaurant is made to feel like a house, with an entry hall filled with tables and a back room where the living room would be. The kitchen and dining area included a walk up bar. At this time of year, with the sun shining and the air nice and still, the courtyard is filled with tables. The restaurant is named after the courtyard where Georgian families traditionally gathered, kids played and adults socialized. We picked a table outside to bask in the heat of the sun. Kristo ordered our food for us—we barely looked at the menu—and next came a salad made of jonjoli with a hard crusty cornbread, and pkhali, the Georgian molded salads made of walnuts and beets, sometimes spinach, and other spices, all processed together, blended to a paste. We tried the house white wine, which was delicious and supplied from a vineyard especially for Kristo’s restaurant.

The waiter brought more food to our table, including a grilled dish made of the stomach of some animal—I was a little too far into the wine at this point to pay too close attention to details. We had a crusty flatbread topped with chicken walnut sauce and the local suluguni cheese. The fried potatoes were a marvel. Kristo was especially proud of her potatoes, grown by a farmer she knew in the upper hills of Georgia where the water was fresh and spring fed and could only be reached cross country. There are no roads. She said they were the most organically grown potatoes you could find anywhere in the world—something along those lines—and we could taste the difference.

The neighbor’s dog came and rested by our feet, watching us eat with pleading eyes. Children of friends played with Kristo’s children around the tables, talking in walkie-talkies and riding toy dump trucks. A couple stray cats loitered about the yard.

A Georgian feast at Ezo, with jonjoli salad (bottom center)

We sat for a time, picking at plates of food we could not finish. It was all so good. We hated to let any go to waste. The cats watched us. The dog thumped its tail—a rhythmic noise on the concrete floor of the courtyard. Its tongue lolled in the afternoon heat. The waiter brought another glass of wine—the red, which Kristo insisted we try before leaving. She was very proud of the restaurant’s Saparavi, the classic Georgian dry red. Once again the restaurant has a special supplier; and, though very affordable, this particular red is not available anywhere else. This wine is an Ezo special, like much of the menu: old-fashioned, simple, but good and unique to Georgia. From the jonjoli salad to the plate of Georgian cheeses served with delicious local honey and the tekamali plum sauce that came out with the potatoes.

Stuffed from a day of eating and drinking, we reached our limit and had to say our farewells. We made our way slowly through the dusty streets of the old town, needing the walk. Passing Freedom Square with its giant pillar topped with St. George defeating the serpent, we turned up the hill to our hotel both pleasantly exhausted from the day’s exertions and ready for a long, late afternoon nap.