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.

It was our first Tbilisi summer stroll down the city’s main drag, Rustaveli Avenue; two sweaty, newly arrived pie-eyed tourists tripping on the 2001 reality. There were billboards advertising the recent kidnapping of a Lebanese businessman, policemen in crumpled gray uniforms extorting money from random motorists with a wag of their batons, and at the top of the street, a former luxury hotel looking like a vertical shanty was full of displaced Georgians from Abkhazia. Parched and cotton-mouthed, we entered a café of sorts for cool respite. The room had high ceilings, was stark and all marble-tiled, including the long, wide bar. A splendid social-realism mosaic of women, grapes and wine was laid into the back wall. The counter was decorated with a few tin ashtrays and a spinning rack holding several tall cone-shaped beakers filled with technicolored syrups.

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.

Editor’s note: It’s Beat the Heat Week at Culinary Backstreets, and in this week’s stories, we’re sharing some of our favorite spots to visit when the summer temperatures soar. Summer in Tbilisi means sweet and sour cherries, plums, apricots, peaches, fresh figs, watermelons and, most importantly, tomatoes that taste the way God intended them to. It’s a season bursting with flavors – but there’s a hitch. Tbilisi summers are oppressively hot and humid, the thick, gritty city air leaves a mucky film on the roof of your mouth, stifling your appetite and keeping you out of your favorite local eateries. Everyone evacuates the capital in the summer, and if we can’t manage to get out of town for weeks on end, we can at least drive 15 minutes to spend an afternoon at Armazis Kheoba for some lungfuls of fresh air and beef liver mtsvadi.

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.

There was a dowdy little joint in Batumi, Georgia’s Black Sea port town, where two middle-aged women churned out the most exquisite Adjarian-style khachapuri pies in an old pizza oven. It was a must-stop for every trip to the coast, as there were few places in Tbilisi that could scorch such an authentic acharuli. As the years passed, the seedy potholed streets that hosted a pool hall, brothels and our favorite khachapuri joint transformed into a gentrified neighborhood of gift shops and boutiques catering to the ever-growing number of tourists flocking to Batumi. Meanwhile, the boat-shaped acharuli has become one of the most emblematic dishes of Georgian cuisine and is not only found all over Tbilisi, but is also being served in New York and Washington, DC.

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.

Snail khinkali? It might sound, at first, like an odd combination. On closer consideration of Georgian cuisine and history, however, it makes good sense. For one thing – perhaps the most important – they’re tasty, and we have yet to hear anyone who’s tried them disagree. The signature dish at Metis restaurant, which is – for now at least –the only place in Tbilisi one can have them, they remind us more of mushroom than of meat khinkali: savory, smooth, a little buttery, with some brightness from parsley and a hint of pastis. Metis’ logo, a snail with a khinkali for a shell, expresses the playful blend of French and Georgian cuisines that owner Thibault Flament is pursuing in close collaboration with his chef, Goarik Padaryan.

We returned to Tbilisi in 2002 with the intention of staying one year. On that first day back, our friends took us to a chummy brick-walled cellar in Sololaki. There was enough sunlight coming down through the door to illume low pine tables and seating for fifty people max. In a refrigerated counter, menu items were displayed: beef tongue, tomato and cucumber salad, assorted cheeses, badrijani (sliced fried eggplant stuffed with a garlicky walnut paste), all the standard stuff. It was a Georgian greasy spoon, for sure, with a kitchen that would make a health inspector shudder, but the khinkali were really good, and the house wine was as decent as it comes. The name of the place was Dukani Racha. Little did we know people had been coming here for decades.

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.

Out here in Garikula, our slice of heaven an hour west of Tbilisi, spring is peaking. It started with the plum blossoms and now the apple, pear and cherry blossoms are popping, painting the countryside in patches of white and pink. Walking along a village path with our neighbor Shota, he suddenly stops, bends down and reaches into a wad of weeds and pulls. “Ah-ha,” he says showing us a little bundle of wild asparagus, skinny, green and an appetizing revelation when cooked just right. Back in Tbilisi, this asparagus appeared in the central bazaar a couple weeks ago, along with other welcomed indications that springtime has finally arrived.

When wandering around Tbilisi, we often find ourselves at a loss when looking to grab a quick, quality snack to fill our stomachs. As much as we love our favorite Georgian cheesy bread, sometimes we want a little something more than khachapuri or pastries. Many times, these inexpensive offerings are infamous for deceiving customers with various forms of cheap filling folded into the dough in lieu of real cheese. Then, of course, there is the ubiquitous shaurma (a transliteration of the Georgian word შაურმა) – an unfortunately tasteless descendent of the Middle Eastern shawarma. This dearth of quality street food and an abundance of disappointing snacks is an ongoing issue but, as seems to be the story the world over, some entrepreneurial souls realized they could fill this gap during the Covid-19 pandemic, offering quick bites via delivery and takeaway.

It started with a resurfaced meme. A 1953 black-and-white photo of a Ukrainian-emigrant-owned restaurant in Washington, D.C., offering free borscht to celebrate Stalin’s death. Seeing it reposted now has reminded me of the culture war that simmered last year over the hearty, beetroot-heavy soup when celebrity Ukrainian chef Ievgen Klopotenko started a campaign to have UNESCO recognize it as a part of Ukraine’s cultural heritage – partly in response to a 2019 tweet published by a Russian government account that claimed “#Borsch is one of Russia's most famous & beloved #dishes & a symbol of traditional cuisine.”