There’s no dish that signals in the arrival of spring and early summer in Georgia like the verdant tangy lamb stew called chakapuli. The spring dish, originally from the country’s wine growing eastern region of Kakheti, makes its seasonal debut at Orthodox Easter (or Paska) feasts that usually falls around mid-April. After a long, solemn period of reflection and penance when all meat (except the permissible fish) and pleasure are eschewed by the faithful, joyful cries of “Kristi Aghsdga!” or “Christ is Risen!” replaces standard greetings for a day of feasting and celebration. Families and friends (and lucky invited guests) gather around tables laden with all the classic staples of a Georgian supra, but the signature starter dish proffered is soup bowls of lamb (or veal) simmered in a rich white wine-based broth with fresh green tarragon, spring onions, green coriander, fresh young garlic bulbs and sour green plums called tkemali.

Gldani was built on the northern outskirts of Tbilisi during the 1970s and 1980s as a satellite city of well-ordered concrete towers for the working masses. Newer and pricier (though still uninspired) real estate developments are now challenging the Soviet blocks, but Gldani still remains predominantly a working-class district. Located around the last stop of Tbilisi's main metro line, Akhmeteli Theatre, Gldani’s center “is packed with local businesses like exchange kiosks, shopping malls, street vendors, casinos or cafes,” writes Tbilisi architecture biennale founder Tinatin Gurgenidze, before adding: “And the famous Gldani Shaurma is also nearby.”

Few locals, let alone tourists have reached the isolated mountain village of Ghebi in Georgia’s northern borderlands of Racha. However, many have passed through the doors of its namesake basement restaurant in the bustling left bank district of Marjanishvili in downtown Tbilisi. For more than a decade, the eatery has been steadily serving up comfort food from the region including lobio, the red bean stew with or without the aged Racha salted ham called lori, bean-stuffed pies called lobiani, and skhmeruli, the garlic saturated pan-roasted chicken dish. Located on Aghmashenebeli Avenue, which is more well known for its profusion of Turkish lokantasi diners with ready-made buffet spreads and Arab restaurants that attract many of the city’s foreign residents and visitors from South Asia and the Middle East, Ghebi remains a staunch local haunt frequented by tables of Georgian men toasting their chachas late into the evening over tables loaded with food.

Aghmashenebeli avenue – the main street on the left bank of the Mtkvari River – is well-known for its Turkish eateries and the presence of Barbarestan, a popular Georgian restaurant. But a handful of new food joints have opened recently, serving mainly Indian and Middle Eastern food, and sometimes a mix of both. One of these new spots is Beirut Saj, which opened in April 2022. The venue is easy to miss when walking along the never-ending Aghmashenebeli avenue – its entrance is discrete and you have to take a few steps down to enter. A hint that you’ve arrived at the right place is the sight of barber shops. A Turkish barber is located upstairs, and next door, in the basement, is a Lebanese barbershop called Miami.

Google khachapuri and the top images that pop up are that of the classic boat-shaped version, its golden orb of an egg yolk cracked in the center of melty cheese still bubbling fresh out of the oven. This classic recipe from the Black Sea coastal region of Adjara that gives it its name, Adjaruli khachapuri, is undeniably one of the most iconic visual representations of Georgian cuisine. While indeed an undeniably photogenic and enticingly seductive dish, the Adjaruli khachapuri’s domineering image often obscures the fact that there are dozens of different varieties of the khachapuri that exist around the country. Most restaurant menus options are also often reduced to just a handful of varieties, like the imeruli, with a single layer of cheese baked inside, the more opulent megruli, which adds a crust of cheese on top, and the all too ubiquitous Adjaruli.

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.

2022 was marked by the rebirth and reshuffle of the Tbilisi food scene, which was strongly impacted by almost two years of pandemic-related restrictions. In September, the reopening of the iconic Café Littera located in the Sololaki district was a sign that the lean days were over. Some other restaurants didn’t recover and closed for good but a bunch of new eateries sprang out across town. Quite surprisingly, the war in Ukraine has not affected the trend. In an unlikely turn of events, the influx of thousands of Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians – many of whom are highly-skilled remote workers – have brought a new clientele to the local restaurants and bars.

If there were ever such a thing as an oracle for gentrification, Eka Janashia believes her father could qualify as one. We’re sitting in Eka’s chic café, Satatsuri, with its earthy brick walls and warm wood floors – a space that used to be the family head’s modest two-bedroom ground floor apartment in a rather rundown corner of Marjanishvili. The district was established in the early 17th century by German migrants who were invited  by Tsar Alexander I to settle in what was then part of the Russian Transcaucasian Empire. 

“Lobio saved Georgia in the nineties,” quips Aleko Sardanashvili as he plonks a round clay pot of the simmering red bean stew in the middle of a loaded table of food. It groans under the weight of an assortment of Georgian feasting staples - khachapuri, lobiani, tomato and cucumber salad, sauteed potatoes garnished with greens, jonjoli salad, pickled chilies, fried chicken, tkemali plum sauce and more. We’re at Aleko’s marani (or wine cellar) in Racha – one of Georgia’s most sparsely populated regions, located in its northwestern frontier. It used to be a six-hour long circuitous route by car to get here from Tbilisi until a spanking new road launched last year cut travel time to Racha by 1.5 hours. Since then, visitor numbers have sharply increased to Georgia’s smallest wine region, a place that offers the ability to dip into family wineries in vineyards slung along the slopes of its lower valleys and drive up to high ridges for magnificent views of the snowcapped peaks of the Greater Caucasus massif, all in one afternoon – although the reverse order is more advisable, for obvious reasons.

When it first opened in 2017, Hualing Tbilisi Sea Plaza was supposed to be the largest shopping mall in the South Caucasus. But all signs suggest that the gigantic commercial center has yet to live up to its great expectations, with one journalist noting that at times “shoppers were outnumbered by shops.” The mall was one of the flashy elements of a $170 million investment by the Chinese Hualing Group that went into transforming 420 hectares of a desolate eastern Tbilisi suburb called Varketili into Hualing Tbilisi Sea New City, with developments that included a colossal glass-shrouded 5-star hotel, rows of 10-story residential complexes and expansive avenues that abruptly adjoin wiggly side streets at the borders of the project site.

No neighborhood is complete without that friendly corner shop that often provides the perfect excuse to pop out of the house for a bit. And when that corner shop serves up the most delectable juicy khinkali and fresh drafts served up in freezer-chilled pint mugs, there’s a dangerous temptation to linger and indulge. Kutkhe literally means “the corner” in Georgian, a no-frills basement restaurant at the corner of two frequented streets in Tbilisi’s left bank district of Marjanishvili. Located just two streets down from Fabrika – the multifunctional art and social space that helped gentrify the former overlooked and disheveled neighborhood – we couldn’t help but pop in while out on some errands on a sweltering day, easily lured by the simple chalkboard outside that promised khinkali, beers, kebabs and fries served up in air-conditioned comfort.

Tbilisi, as part of Eastern Georgia, has always been geographically, culturally and gastronomically far from the nearest shores – those of the Black Sea. Here, the closest you can get to the feeling of the sea while is strolling along the “Tbilisi Sea,” a big reservoir opened by the Soviet authorities in 1953. Located on the northern edge of the city, it boasts a public and a private beach and even a sailing club. Most restaurants in town, along with well-known Georgian dishes, usually serve just one type of fish: trout, which often comes from fish farms.

Follow a narrow alley radiating off the newly renovated Lado Gudiashvili square whose surrounding rebuilt period houses now exudes the tourist-attracting pastiche pleasantness of reconstructed historic centers, and you’ll stumble upon Uzu House, the sole standing habited ruin left on Saiatnova street. Uzu means “vortex” in Japanese, explains Yamato Kuwahara, the reticent founder of the space, which is registered as a non-profit and functions like an informal art residence – “This space is a vortex that brings different people together…it's a space for everyone, no concept or philosophy attached, ” he adds.

In February 2022, when Russian forces invaded Ukraine, after having already occupied parts of the country since February 2014, Georgians responded with anger and solidarity. Drawing parallels to their experiences with the Russian-backed breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, people in Tbilisi organized huge rallies in front of Parliament, gathered humanitarian aid to send to Ukraine, opened their homes to refugees, made solidarity borscht and posted signs in their restaurants and other businesses saying Russians were not welcome. The mood a few hundred kilometers west in rainy Batumi this March was more subdued – the protests were smaller (the city is smaller), and while Ukrainian flags and anti-war slogans blanketed the city, we didn’t see any of the anti-Russian, or even anti-Putin, signs, posters and graffiti that had proliferated throughout Tbilisi.

Once upon a time, Tbilisi wasn’t too kind to vegans – the reputation was sealed when a malicious attack in 2016 by “sausage-wielding” far-right extremists on the city’s then only vegan café made international headlines. Nonetheless, a handful of chefs and restaurant owners are determined to make a change. Tbilisi’s selection of vegan restaurants has increased since the attack, and these days, even those seeking a more gourmand fine-vegan-dining experience finally have an address to call on at Living Vino Vegan Restaurant and Natural Wine Bar. Living Vino’s Ukrainian founder Dimitri Safonov has long been acquainted with Georgia’s wine history – his first glass of homegrown Rkatsiteli was offered to him at the age of 12 by his grandfather, an amateur winemaker from now Russian-occupied Crimea.