Georgian Food: A Culinary Journey In Tbilisi (Part 2)

(Read part one of trip HERE)

It was a turbulent flight and the passengers clapped as the plane bumped to a halt at Kutaisi, the mediaeval capital of the Kingdom of Georgia. A man behind me shouted: “Bravo! Bravo! Bellissimo as they say in Italy!” A woman told everyone to remain in their seats until the seatbelt signs were off. She then spoke for a few minutes in Georgian. It was a soft, pretty language. There was the nasally sound of Russia and eastern Europe, but it was faster and more playful somehow.

A gale was blowing. The airport was modern looking and empty. There was only one other plane – another Wizz Air jet – on the tarmac. The queue at passport control was long and slow. The immigration officers seemed to be asking for every passenger’s life story.

When it was eventually my turn, a woman spent a minute flicking through my passport looking at the stamps and visas. “First time in Georgia?” she asked. I told her it was. She stamped my passport with a year-long visa, then handed it back and said “bye bye”. She seemed surprised and slightly suspicious when I said thank you.

It was past midnight and there was a 30-minute wait for the bus that would take us through the mountains to the capital Tbilisi. I bought a large can of Georgian lager and a bottle of water for eight laris (about £2.50). I wondered how much change I’d have got out of a £10 note back at Luton Airport.

Then I thought better of drinking the beer; thinking about the five-hour bus ride ahead. I hadn’t had time to book a hotel and had no idea what I’d do when I got there at dawn. The bus was packed, mostly with British students. At first I thought they were part of a group tour led by an Asian man in his fifties who walked with a stick. He kept wandering up and down the aisle giving updates on when the driver was finally going to turn the heating down and put the ventilation on.

After another 30 minutes or so, the bus left the airport. We climbed slowly up through the mountains and I caught the occasional glimpse of the sheer side of cliffs. There was no yellow hum of city lights, just the twinkle of distant villages, like lakes mirroring the starry sky above. The roads were empty and we passed through endless hamlets where nothing stirred. Occasionally we’d crawl past a roadside café, but apart from the houses, the only buildings seemed to be gas stations, brightly lit and ghostly. There seemed to be so many that if you ran out of petrol you’d have less than a mile to walk to the nearest. I noticed the number of police stations too. Plush glass buildings with all the lights on, and the occasional police officer sitting at a desk doing paperwork. It didn’t make much sense. There wasn’t a soul on the road and no-one was up, and yet they seemed to have the police resources to stop a midnight riot in Paris.

Behind me, an English man was talking on his phone to a woman asking for money. She kept saying: “Not good, not good. I worry much.” She said her rent was due and he eventually agreed to wire her some cash and top up the credit on her phone. “Okay I love you,” she said as the call ended.

At some point we stopped at some great monstrosity in the middle of nowhere that seemed to be half food hall and half supermarket. The man behind tapped me on the shoulder. He was wearing a bulging red fleece, black-rimmed glasses and had a grey quiff. He looked like a fat Stewart Lee. He handed me a five-lari note, and asked me to get him a bottle of water. I hadn’t even planned to get off the bus. I was slightly annoyed at first, but then I realised he used a wheelchair. I looked at the note – on the back was a drawing of a man in shorts holding a fish and a bucket. I handed back the note and said I’d get him some water.

The food hall was empty apart from the sleeping staff and our weary bus party. And we weren’t spending from the look of things. After another interminable, spine-crunching journey through the hills, we joined an empty motorway and picked up speed.

I nodded off and woke to the neon signs of casinos and grand hotels in Freedom Square, in the centre of Tbilisi, where someone had once tried to assassinate US President George W Bush with a hand grenade. In the centre of the square was a huge column, topped with a gold statue of Saint George, the country’s patron saint. In the Soviet era, a statue of Lenin had stood there, but it was torn down in 1991.

Everyone seemed to have someone waiting for them. It was 5am, freezing and I suddenly felt very tired and alone. The man with the stick began to hobble off towards a subway. Either he had lost his tour party or he didn’t have one to start with. He was clutching a Lidl plastic bag that presumably served as his suitcase. I wandered after him and quickly caught up. I asked him if he knew of any hotels that were open. There was a Marriott hotel up the road, but it looked hideously expensive.

Babar, as his name turned out to be, said he’d booked a bed at a hostel and I was welcome to follow him there. We walked for 10 minutes down Rustaveli Avenue, which I would find out later was Tblisi’s main street and named after the mediaeval poet Shota Rustaveli, author of The Knight In The Panther’s Skin.

The city was glittering with golden light. There were hundreds of angels blowing trumpets. They were hanging from wires across the road, lighting up the impressive Soviet architecture. The trees were wrapped in fairy lights. Everything seemed to be gold. I asked whether it was always like this, but Babar looked at me as though I was an idiot and told me it was Christmas Day. The Georgians apparently used a different calendar and celebrated it on January 7. New Year’s Day, confusingly also called the Old New Year, was a week later on January 14. I was worried there might not be room at the inn. If not, there were a few 24-hour bars and restaurants I could sit in until it got light, Babar said.

He said he’d stayed at the hostel a couple of times. It was his fifth trip to Georgia. He was planning to buy an apartment and had already seen a few on previous visits. Property was supposed to be cheap in Georgia, but Babar didn’t look like he had a fiver in his pocket the way he was hobbling down the road with an NHS walking stick, adorned with plasters, in one hand, and a carrier bag in the other. I liked him straight away. He had a confident, easy-going nature and told me about his many trips around eastern Europe. He said his mother had recently passed away, and looked close to tears for a second. “She was my strength,” he said. But he was soon back to his cheerful way.

What worried me was the thought of a hostel. I hadn’t stayed in one for years. The last one had been a homeless hostel in Amsterdam after I had my passport and money stolen and found myself pacing the canals with just six euros to my name. It hadn’t been a pleasant experience. There must have been 40 men in that room. And the smell is something I still remember. It was the smell of rancid vinegar. The time before that, I’d been bitten alive by bedbugs, but that had been a particularly filthy place even by Cambodian flophouse standards.

I was still toying with the idea of finding a bar and drinking myself steadily through morning until the check-in desks opened. But it was bitterly cold and I was worried that Christmas Day might mean all the hotels were full or closed. I was even less confident about finding a bar open at 5am. It certainly didn’t look like a 24-hour city. But Babar said I could probably find somewhere to drink. “Not that I’m calling you an alcoholic,” he said.

I was desperately tired. Even the worst bed in the worst hostel in Gomorrah was better than pacing the streets for a few hours, even if the angels were looking down. Babar told me Airbnb had started opening up in Georgia and they were ridiculously cheap. But he didn’t like the idea of staying in someone’s apartment. “I prefer hostels because you meet people,” he said. He was right about that.

(Continues...)

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...)