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.

It was a scorcher of a summer day in 2002, and we were pushing our broken Russian motorcycle and sidecar through crowded Plekhanov streets with a gnarly case of cotton mouth. Dripping in sweat, we limped up to the kiosk by our building and slipped some coins to the lovely Irma for a lifesaving cold bottle of Borjomi mineral water. She reached into her little fridge and passed a bottle to our trembling hands. We twisted it open, took a deep three-gulp pull and grabbed our neck in a panic, alcoholic vapors steaming from every pore of our body. Gasping, we handed the bottle back to her. “This is not Borjomi,” we wheezed. She sniffed it and jumped back. “Oh sorry. That is my husband’s spiritus,” she explained, replacing it deep into the fridge with a real bottle after checking it first.

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.

You are motionless, stuck in a traffic jam after a long day at work while your stomach growls. You know the rest of the family will be hungry when you get home and that the fridge is empty and sad. Shopping and cooking is out of the question, so you turn onto a Vera side street, zig-zag through one-way lanes to Tatishvili Street, double park, and run into a tiny gastronomic oasis that has been saving lives like yours for nearly a decade. Its name is Tartan. Located in a step-down ground-floor apartment, takeout cafeterias don’t get homier than this. The front room is taken up with a long counter of refrigerated display cases half filled with enough ready-made dishes to lay down a feast when you get home.

At the cusp of winter’s end, men across Georgia balance on wobbly ladders and trim their grapevines. The clippings will be used later for baking bread in traditional tone ovens and for roasting mtsvadi, skewered chunks of pork, on the embers. Only after the trimming is completed throughout the land is springtime allowed to arrive. And when it comes, it does so in teasing bursts of bold flavors, juicy colors and luscious aromas. The first indication of spring is the arrival of tarkhuna – tarragon – at the central bazaar, where we love to shop for produce.

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.

We are on the eighth floor terrace of a relatively new apartment building in the Vedzisi neighborhood, nodding our heads with joker grins like gawkers at a freak show. The view is as spectacular as they come in mountainy Tbilisi, but that’s not what we’re chuckling at. There are 43 ceramic urns – kvevri – buried almost a meter and a half into a bed of sand and perlite in what was supposed to be a swimming pool for a nine-year-old boy. But in an epiphanic moment, the child’s father, 43-year-old doctor, Zura Natroshvili, decided to build a marani in the sky instead. The father of modern advertising, David Ogilvy, once said, “The best ideas come as jokes.” Dr. Natroshvili would probably agree. His friends thought he needed psychiatric help when he first shared his idea.

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.

We met Tega at a friend’s dinner table shortly after moving to Tbilisi in 2002. Tall, debonair, with dark puppy eyes and an ever-present Colgate smile, Tega made it a point from that first meeting to take us under his wing and introduce us to the best Tbilisi had to offer. That was how we first ended up at Salobie, near the ancient capital of Mtskheta. “This place is famous for its beans,” he said. “And its name is Beans!” he chortled (lobio means “beans” in Georgian, and salobie is “house of beans”). The restaurant felt like something between a museum and a summer mountain resort. We were in the original dining room, built next to a giant 300-year-old wooden house from Racha.

Happiness comes in all forms, but according to Aristotle’s scale there are four distinct levels to this particular emotion – say, for example, waking up to a glorious sunny day (laetus), getting a special discount from your local green grocer (felix) or watching your dog do its business in a sinister neighbor’s yard (beatitudo). Looking out the window, the snow-capped Caucasus along the horizon on this bright day, our eyes scan the city and settle over our own neighborhood of Vera, below. We sigh a sensual “yes” and nod smugly with our arms crossed because now there is a place in the hood where we can experience each of Aristotle’s levels of happiness in one splendid sitting.

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.