When you are an expat you automatically become a first point of contact for anyone that knows anyone that is dropping into your home away from home. Many times a month someone messages me about a friend of a friend that will be in Tbilisi for two days or a week or a year and can I share my details with them? I categorically say yes, knowing that many of these people will never reach out, never ask how to take the bus or get picked up at the airport, where to buy a SIM card. Maybe just having a local number is enough, a safety net, the promise of help if it is needed. They come and go, and all too often we never cross paths. But then there are the times that we do.
I’ll just call him E.
He is staying just a few minutes walk from us. He can give me a shout and we go have some pizza. It is almost like I am back in the East Village.
Last night, we had a last-minute plan to grab some dinner and I had two options to offer. It is in moments like this that I understand so little about this city, and can say plenty about where we should NOT eat, but so little about what would be a good choice. There are good places out there, beyond the top ten lists and the perennial favorites. The problem here, is that restaurants can start out wonderful but then a year or two after opening they just phone it in and the quality suffers deeply. They deserved to be on that list when they opened, but remain there for no good reason.
Then, a third person was mixed into our plans - a Georgian that should of course know where to go. He is polite and funny, as only Georgians can be - wise and humble, making life seem completely effortless. He says “let’s just get in my car.”
Then he makes a call, and we are traveling to the oldest part of the city. There are steps down, and more steps down and we are suddenly deep underground. The walls are all dusty bricks, arches and curves and the oldest air. We walk through the wine museum, inches away from artifacts that are 8,000 years old. The place is closed, but open for us and a handful of other people that sit at tables, speaking in low voices.
The hallways open up into a great underground space with chandeliers and tables that belong in a castle, surrounded by knights in armor making solemn pledges. The chef and the sommelier greet us, and I cannot stop smiling like a Cheshire Cat. I have stumbled into another secret room - as usual by accident, riding shotgun with a visitor as we shake hands with the finest people.
The menu is lovely, a heady mix of tradition and finesse. The wine comes, a goruli mtsvane/chinuri blend. It smells of fallen apples, and the ocean. The first sip is gentle - it has a lower alcohol level, which means the wine does not come to you, you need to tiptoe up to it instead. It has a wobbly mouth feel, and you taste it long after that sip, coating the inside of your mouth. It is a balanced wine, the acid has been tamed and turned into body. And then the dishes start coming, of bread so hot from the oven that you cannot pick it up from your plate, just twist off the very edge to chew on. And now chicken liver mouse bathed in cherries, and various pkhali that look like bland little piles of mashed vegetables, but it would be a mistake to describe them that way. They are the ultimate vegetarian food - some parts raw, some cooked, carefully spiced, some gentle some pushy, some salty, some sweet, made from pumpkin and beans, from wild herbs and pickled flowers and everything else under the sun. They sit in a row, waiting to be spooned into, leaving nothing but the traces of their work by the time we are done.
And now that wine is wrapping its arms around everything, tasting suddenly different but from the very same bottle, now more alive as if it was half asleep when the cork was popped. And now we toast to old friends, to sweet memories, and to life itself because that is what a Georgian table inspires you to do, no matter where you are from.
The duck arrives, in a deep reduction, circled by roasted quince.
Yes, this is the rare air - the luck of being here, and saying “ no, forget the place I suggested - where do YOU want to go?”
Excellent read. You did not disappoint! I could close my eyes and be there!
I actively despise the term expat. It reeks of superiority and of standing apart and above. Maybe, as a Brit, it reeks of shameful colonialism, or brings up too many connotations of leather-skinned Brits on the Costa Del, flocking only to local restaurants with "proper" menus outside the premises featuring photographs of fish and chips and burgers.
I myself am a proud immigrant.