Georgian Food: A Culinary Journey In Tbilisi (Part 1)

It all happened at the last minute, and pretty soon I was on the midnight plane to Georgia. According to the inflight magazine, it was a small country not much bigger than Wales. In fact, assuming the map was correct, if you stretched out the north coast of Wales about as far as the Isle of Man, then spun Wales 90 degrees to the right, it would be about the same shape as Georgia. It looked like a very bad drawing of a dinosaur. A fat dinosaur. A dinosaur that could barely lift its belly from the ground. And from what I’d heard about the hearty food and the Georgians’ love of booze, it might have been a fitting description.

The dinosaur’s head and neck was on the Black Sea and its body stretched east, stopping well short of the Caspian Sea. Its front feet were perched on the boulder of Turkey to the southwest, but to stop it sliding off, its belly was splayed on Armenia to the south, and its rear on Azerbaijan to the southeast. Directly north was the crushing weight of Russia.

As you can tell, I knew – and still know very little - about what travel guides often lazily describe as this “mysterious” and “secret” former Soviet stronghold. But in fairness, I’d been pretty much unaware of its existence until August 2008, when Russia snatched South Ossetia and Abkhazia like a school bully raiding a smaller kid’s lunch box. I was working for a TV news station in London at the time, and for a week covered every twist and turn of the war from the safety of my windowless hutch, spoon-fed by wire copy, and with only pictures from the ground to give me any sort of indication about what the place looked like.

I don’t remember much about the conflict now. Only that at the time I was pretty sure it was the beginning of World War Three, so brazen was Russia’s invasion. I’d been trying to give up smoking and make a substantial cut to my drinking, but the thought of nuclear missiles lighting up the sky quickly put an end to that, just as it did when Donald Trump came to power eight years later.

A line in the sand must surely be drawn, I’d thought. How could America and its Western allies stand by and watch the annexation of a sovereign country after all the kerfuffle over Iraq? Surely a stand would have to be made? A stand that would only be decided by bombs. But then, of course, little Georgia was an insignificant country that had no oil, and as few people knew where it was on the map, nothing was done. Georgia was rarely on their mind.

Instead, the West stood by like a shame-faced commuter pretending not to see a granny being mugged at a bus stop. And as I flew into the country in early January, more than a decade after that five-day war, Russia still held the land it took without a blush – and had absolutely no intention of handing it back.

So apart from Georgia’s famed hospitality and love of the vine, that was about all I knew about the region as I sat on that crowded five-hour flight from Luton Airport to Kutaisi, the country’s third largest city, reading about Georgian food in preparation for the week ahead.

I put some traditional Georgian music on my headphones. It had a strange, unearthly quality to it. Folk musos in ill-fitting Fairport Convention T-shirts might corner you at parties and tell you its beauty and ethereal nature comes from its polyphonic roots – interweaving vocal harmonies, often backed by a three-stringed lute called a panduri.

It sounds a little like Irish music when you first hear it, and there are DNA studies showing Ireland’s saints and scholars were descended from farmers and bronze metalworkers who travelled from the Middle East and Black Sea thousands of years ago. They may have even been the origin of the western Celtic language. All I can tell you is the music sounds old. Very old. Like the sound of ancient Gods lamenting lost loves and fallen heroes.

As for the booze, I knew Georgia claimed to be the home of wine, with archaeologists tracing the first known wine-making to the South Caucasus 8,000 years ago. The early Georgians apparently discovered grape juice could be turned into wine by burying it underground for the winter in qvevri – egg-shaped clay pots that have now become an official symbol of the country, and as I would discover, are found on everything from fridge magnets to tea towels. The only thing I couldn’t understand is what took them so long.

I’d also heard the beer was pretty good, and there were an increasing number of microbreweries making craft beer. The chacha, a sort of colourless rocket fuel like Greece’s tsipouro, could be dangerously strong. And the Georgians liked to toast anything, even a successfully-cooked soft-boiled egg for breakfast. The convention was to down your glass at every toast - with the drinking vessels getting bigger each time. There could be as many as six toasts, perhaps more, depending on the stamina and ruthlessness of the toastmaster.

I’d read a bit about Georgian food over the years, but the only two dishes I could recall as I sat on that plane, next to two Georgians watching kung fu films on their laptops, was a cheese-stuffed bread called khachapuri, that they sometimes shaped like a boat and cracked an egg into, and mushroom-shaped dumplings called khinkali.

I’d never eaten khinkali, so I switched on my tablet and watched them being made on a YouTube video. They resembled the tortellini of Italy or, perhaps more accurately, the momos of Tibet and Nepal. You make a dough from flour, eggs and water, but it is far less eggy than pasta – just two eggs to a kilo of flour, whereas pasta might take ten eggs for the same amount of flour. You roll it out thinly in circles a few inches wide, add a spoonful of spiced minced meat, cheese, mushroom or vegetable filling, crimp the sides, and then twist it into a clever shape and boil for 15 minutes or so.

They are shaped like a leprechaun’s treasure sack, and topped with a nipple-like pinch of dough to hold them together. You eat them with your hands, holding them by the nipple and biting in while doing your best to avoid gravy running down your chin. The nipple you put back on your plate. It is considered cheap to eat them, the video said - they help the waiter count how many you’ve eaten while totting up the bill.

I also read how Georgians like to flavour their food with cumin, blue cardamom, dried marigold leaves and pomegranates – but most of all with walnuts. If there is anything that really sums up Georgian food, it is the heavy use of walnuts, food writers seem to agree. They also like to eat plenty of fresh herbs with their food – and there is often a saucer or two of fresh sprigs on the table. 

The only country I’d been to that ate herbs like that was Vietnam, where a bowl of steaming noodle soup (pho) or delicious beef stew (bo kho) would always come with a basket of saw-edged coriander, paddy herbs and thinly sliced banana flowers.

Georgia, like every other country, has its regional dishes, with meatier dishes in the east and more vegetable-based dishes in the west. They also use tandoor clay ovens to bake bread and barbecue meat, and as a rule, do not eat a lot of fish. But it is not easy to summarise a country’s food; there are always exceptions. I read something by an American journalist who’d lived in the country for a number of years. He said there are two rules in Georgia – you don’t criticise their religion (nearly 90% of the population are Eastern Orthodox Christian) and you don’t criticise their food. I made a mental note not to do either.

I’d been told Georgia was a cheap, fast-growing place. I knew expats who were planning to move there from Thailand and Cambodia, saying southeast Asia had become too expensive. The country seemed to be crying out for foreign investment. There was a full-page advert in the inflight magazine for “citizens of any country” to buy flats in Georgia. The developers promised interest-free mortgages without proof of income, and a residence permit with every purchase. For 29,555 euros you could buy an apartment in Batumi, a casino-filled resort on the Black Sea. A few hundred euros more bought you a flat in a snowy resort on the Goderdzi Pass in Adjara.

It would, of course, be impossible to learn any useful idiot level of Georgian in just a week, but I promised myself I would try. If only it was that easy. It proved to be a very difficult language to remember, let alone pronounce. And by the end all I had gleaned – mastered would be far too generous a term – was gamarjoba (hello), diakh (yes), ara (no), getakva (please), me mkvia (my name is), mobrzandit (welcome) and bodishi (I am sorry). The latter would come in useful many times.

(Continues HERE...)