Tbilisi

Fine(d) Dining: Tbilisi Restaurants Face Penalties Upon Reopening

The officials from the Ministry of Health came late in the evening on a Friday night and entered Tbilisi’s popular gastro-entertainment complexes Fabrika and Ghvinis Karkhana-Wine Factory #1. They knew there would be a lot of people here celebrating life again after two and a half months in lockdown. They also understood that even with tables spaced two meters apart, as required, it is difficult to control social distancing after people have had a few drinks. For authorities looking to tally up some fines, it was like shooting ducks in a wine barrel. A total of 16 establishments were fined 10,000 lari ($3,273) in what restaurant owners have described as “raids” two weekends ago for violating Covid-19 regulations. Among the six places at Ghvinis Karkhana that were penalized was Number 8 BBQ House for not having a list of employee temperatures and violating social distancing rules.

Tbilisi

Notes on Reopening: Back to Life at Tbilisi’s Deserter’s Bazaar

My love affair with the Deserter’s Bazaar began in 2001 when I first wandered into the marketplace like a pie-eyed flower child on his very first acid trip. The air seethed with leaded exhaust, stinky cheese, stale body odor and the incessant honking of jalopies. Streets and sidewalks disappeared under tables and blankets displaying everything from village produce and contraband alcohol to Dostoevsky novels and wooden utensils. Shoulder-to-shoulder, people bumped and shuffled and haggled while sweaty men with cigarettes hanging from their lips parted the mass with iron push carts. I returned to Georgia the next year and, as luck would have it, shacked up with a friend a block away from the market, which became my playground. Six somewhat square blocks selling anything you could put a tag on.

Tbilisi

Tedzami Valley Wine: Cracking the Kvevri

Gio Malatsidze kneels down and carefully brushes sand off the plexiglass lid of his kvevri. Five hundred liters of tavkveri wine have been resting for two years in this large clay vessel buried in the ground. Next to it is an open kvevri of healthy chinuri, also two years old. He gently pries the lid off, sealed with silicone putty, cautious not to let any debris fall inside, and frowns. A white film is floating on the surface. Gio dips a wine glass inside, spreading the flotsam away and takes a sip of the dark plum colored wine, washing his mouth with it. It is on the edge but can be rescued, he explains, dipping a carafe to fill our glasses so we can taste what he is talking about. Making natural wine is a risky business.

Tbilisi

First Bites: Tbilisi

The last time I was in a restaurant was March 7. I had bumped into three friends at Sulico Wine Bar and after draining our last bottle of wine we walked down to Republic 24, chef Tekuna Gachechiladze’s latest tour de force. Recalling the lustrous pork belly and the devilish succulence of her khinkali is making me salivate like a thirsty vampire, particularly after burping the blasphemous supermarket khinkali we pulled out of the freezer and boiled for lunch just now. We evacuated Tbilisi shortly after that, stoked up the wood burner in Garikula and unpacked our bags. With a pantry packed with provisions, our first weeks in the village went by as pleasantly as could be during a global pandemic.

Tbilisi

Notes on Reopening: Small Wineries on Shaky Ground

This year was going to be a big one for Oda Family Winery. Since its humble beginning in 2016, the winery and family farm-to-table restaurant in western Georgia’s Samegrelo region had been carefully expanding with the increasing popularity of its outstanding wine and formidable fare. This year, Keto Ninidze and Zaza Gagua calculated 3,000 guests would visit their restaurant, located in the front yard of their family’s oda (a traditional wooden two-storey house) in Martvili, so they emptied their savings and added new washrooms and a storage room for wine equipment, made a larger garden, and advertised for seven more employees to add to their staff of three. Then coronavirus arrived. “Thank God I didn’t hire any of the applicants and they didn’t leave their jobs,” Keto says.

Tbilisi

Notes on Reopening: An Uncertain Future for Ezo

The coronavirus infection rate is currently slowing down in Georgia to only several a day (with an occasional exception), and this is about four weeks after Easter, during which some churches insisted on still holding services and had us all biting our nails. Travel restrictions are being lifted, and the government has penciled in June 8 as the day restaurants with outdoor seating can reopen. We just don’t know what conditions will be imposed on everyone. Will waitstaff and clients have to wear masks? How many people per table? Will khinkali be served in individual portions instead of on a huge communal platter? There are lots of questions, perhaps the biggest being, “Who will survive?”

Tbilisi

At Home with Maka Shengelia: Hands in the Paska Dough

Sunday, April 19, was Easter in the Orthodox Christian world, the holiest day of the year. Like most people in today’s pandemic world, Maka Shengelia, one of our walk leaders in Tbilisi, was home being a responsible citizen. But she was also spreading butter on her own freshly baked paska, Easter bread, popular in the Eastern Church. It is a tall, dome-shaped cake, inseparable from Easter’s other “edible decoration,” boiled eggs dyed a deep magenta with endro (madder root). God will forgive you for celebrating Easter without going to church, but commemorating it without red eggs and paska is another matter entirely.