We are toasting on a warm summer night in the garden of a restuarant, what Georgians call an “Italian courtyard”. There is a stray cat curled up on an empty chair. The wine is cold, a khikvi from a small cellar, amber wine that spent time in a qvevri longe before we found this table. My dinner companion is a New Yorker I just met, and this is not his first time in this country. He knows what the roads used to look like. We interrogate the menu, and order half of the things on it. But the first thought in my mind is to be the tomada tonight, the toast master. There are no single glasses of wine in Georgia, no single toast but a series of them on nights like this. They tell a story, they invite memory, soaking up the sad chunks of life and wringing them out on the floor, they celebrate the simplest joys and everything in-between.
Every culture has their basic toast - and I think this speaks volumes about their character. If you say cheers it is so polite and reserved, it is so banal, it means almost nothing. If you say nazdarovya, you are saying “to good health” and the be frank, that implies we are all going to die sooner than later and with some luck we will live a few days more. I find that to be a terribly underwhelming toast. Can you imagine someone at your birthday party standing up with a wine glass saying “well, hopefully we will not die tomorrow.” And then there is l'chaim - to life. It is almost the exact opposite. Let’s live! Not just survive, not just make it to tomorrow - let’s gnaw the bones dry, let’s dance the night away. And then there is the most simple Georgian toast gaumarjos, which means “victory to you” or just “victory” or “victory to us”. Your victory is my victory, that is how this crazy world actually works. It is truly generous, and all-encompassing. When this simple toast is made here, it is echoed - gaumarJOS. JOS, JOS. Each louder than the next, like a child underlining a word in ballpoint pen with such excitement that the paper rips apart.
But tonight, I will try to recreate the long-winding road of toasts I have witnessed at our wedding party, at birthdays of loved ones, at long tables under great trees with friends drinking the wine they make, ripping into grilled meats, spilling sour plum sauce on my shoes as I try to keep up. The first toast is traditionally “to God” but that is just one road. Instead, I propose a toast to “what we believe in”. My dinner companion smirks, he immediately gets the modern interpretation. He knows the next ones will be to our parents, then to our children. He has a son, I have two daughters, it is natural to share stories about them, finding that common ground of parenthood that knows no borders, that wrestles the same angels and demons no matter where you call home. And then there is a toast to home, whatever that may mean. What is home? This an impossible question for people like us that were born in one corner of the world, and grew up somewhere else. But we are both New Yorkers, we drank ourselves silly in the same bars, went on bad dates in certain Italian restaurants, mourned the closing of others. The toasts are nudges to open up, to share stories we have half-forgotten, instead of the ones we tell far too much.
We toast to the ones we lost. We toast to the ancestors we never knew. We toast to our wives, and share salty stories about the tolerant, enigmatic creatures that call us husband.
The food is magnificent. A salad of bitter wild greens and flowers, phkali, the freshest cheese, luminous pickles, chadi (corn biscuits) slightly bitter and cooked in sunflower oil. And then chakapuli, a heady stew of lamb, sour plums and fourteen tons of tarragon. It speaks to the wine, which now runs sweeter because of what is next it. Then lulya kebab (lamb) grilled on a skewer that is actually a stick of cinnamon, as burnt and smoky as you can imagine. And ajabsandal, the Georgian cousin to Sicilian caponata. The night grows long with swipes of bread, as the wine dwindles low, and we make my favorite toast, to sweet memories. Nostalgia, and those salad days that made us who we are, older with so much less hair, wiser on some days but sometimes just as foolish, maybe with bigger laughs.
Where I come from in south London (strictly speaking, sarf Lahndahn), we say "Up your bum!"
And my work here is done.
I’m trying to get my kids to stop constantly using the F word. Somehow we’ve settled on this one to express Everything in life. It’s too much for this one little word to live up to. Brother The Road of Toasts is fucking beautiful.