“The future is in water and grain,” says Natia Kalandarishvili. She is the co-founder of Graminea, a minimalist but inviting shop in Sololaki whose mission goes beyond just selling the best sourdough in town. The bakery uses endemic Georgian wheat for their bread flour in an effort to support rebalancing the national wheat market – an unusual approach in a bread-heavy cuisine which relies primarily on imported wheat. Natia and her friend Salome Zakaraia started Graminea in February 2023. Now head baker, Salome was previously a makeup artist by profession, working on film sets. But like many others during the Covid-19 pandemic, she started baking sourdough while she was stuck at home.

Restaurants aren't hard to come by in Tbilisi, but it is harder to find places that feel like eating in your grandmother’s living room. Walls lined with family photographs fading from color to black and white, an eclectic collection of paintings, a whole window dedicated to religious icons, and a menu that can change on a whim. This is Nikolozi, a tiny restaurant in Sololaki run by Dodo Ilashvili, a singular powerhouse who creates the food and the feeling all herself.

Sausages and beer might not sound much like a Tbilisi affair, but this most Bavarian of combinations is what has been served up steadily for more than five decades in one of the city’s oldest watering holes. Nodar Vardiashvili and his shop have survived the collapse of the Soviet Union as well as the tumultuous decade of civil war and economic devastation that followed. Through the roiling changes that transformed the wider region and the skyline of Tbilisi as better economic years returned, little changed in the metal-clad, bunker-like establishment in the neighborhood of Nazaladevi that has been slinging sausages and pouring beer (and sweet fizzy lemonades) since 1964.