On our mouthwatering multi-day Georgia trip, organized in collaboration with Atlas Obscura, we explore the birthplace of wine. The trip includes a stop in the hills around Ateni for a feast and natural wine tasting at Andro Barnovi winery – Andro, our host, walks us through the winemaking process and also prepares a luscious country supper.

Ivane Tarkhnishvili Street is a 300-meter stretch of blacktop in the Vera neighborhood that links the lower part of the quarter to the upper part. We used to drop off clothes for dry cleaning here and meet for coffee at Kafe Literaturuli, two establishments lost to the dustbin of time. For several years, we had no reason to venture to this part of the hood, until a friend tipped us off to a new place that opened last September. It’s called Pepperboy, and it is the one restaurant in Georgia that will take you on a wildly delectable ride through pan-Asian cuisines.

She came to Kakheti from Tbilisi in 2005 and couldn’t drag herself away. The Alazani River Valley stretches long and wide to the feet of the Caucasus, the tallest mountains in Europe, which jut skyward like some citadel for the mountain gods. The expanse inspires reverence and awe. Kakheti intoxicates. “I want to live here,” Sopo Gorgadze told herself. She spent nearly every weekend and holiday in the region. One evening in Tbilisi, Sopo, a stage painter, met a tall, captivating architect at a friend’s dinner party. It wasn’t long after their first date in Kakheti that the couple left the capital behind and established themselves in the Kakhetian village of Shalauri.

We were living in an urban cave: a dark, cramped, one-room ground-floor apartment next to the Marjanishvili Theater in Plekhanov. At 60 bucks a month we could hardly complain – after all, there were greater things to grumble about. The year was 2002, and electricity was a capricious luxury that always seemed to go off the moment you came home only to come back on the moment you went to bed. And there were the cops, whose sole duty was to extort money from people. Occasionally, we would even gripe about dinner. “Georgian, again?” There were several greasyspoons along Aghmashenebeli, our main drag, which was often buried under a bone-rattling cacophony of gasoline-powered generators. The menus were all the same, so we would go to one place for their shkmeruli, another for ostri and the famed El Depo for khinkali. They were fine, but we missed variety.

Named after the soldiers who fled the Czar’s army in the early 19th century and sold their guns and equipment there, the Deserter’s Bazaar today is the main food source of most of Tbilisi’s restaurants and many families seeking the best bargains in fresh produce, like the winter greens and veggies we spotted on a recent Old Market walk.

Happiness comes in all forms, but according to Aristotle’s scale there are four distinct levels to this particular emotion – say, for example, waking up to a glorious sunny day (laetus), getting a special discount from your local green grocer (felix) or watching your dog do its business in a sinister neighbor’s yard (beatitudo). Looking out the window, the snow-capped Caucasus along the horizon on this bright day, our eyes scan the city and settle over our own neighborhood of Vera, below. We sigh a sensual “yes” and nod smugly with our arms crossed because now there is a place in the hood where we can experience each of Aristotle’s levels of happiness in one splendid sitting.

Happiness comes in all forms, but according to Aristotle’s scale there are four distinct levels to this particular emotion – say, for example, waking up to a glorious sunny day (laetus), getting a special discount from your local green grocer (felix) or watching your dog do its business in a sinister neighbor’s yard (beatitudo). Looking out the window, the snow-capped Caucasus along the horizon on this bright day, our eyes scan the city and settle over our own neighborhood of Vera, below. We sigh a sensual “yes” and nod smugly with our arms crossed because now there is a place in the hood where we can experience each of Aristotle’s levels of happiness in one splendid sitting.

Going out for a Georgian dinner in Tbilisi used to be a predictable, belt-popping affair. There were very few variations on the menus of most restaurants, all of which offered mtsvadi (roast pork), kababi (roast pork-beef logs), ostri (beef stew) and kitri-pomidori (tomato-cucumber) salad. To open a restaurant and call it Georgian without these staple dishes would have been as ludicrous as a coffeehouse with no coffee. In the past several years, however, young local cooks have been expanding the rich possibilities of Georgian cuisine to both much applause and a lot of finger wagging for blaspheming traditional recipes.

Darra Goldstein introduced a generation of cooks and readers to the cuisine and culture of Georgia with her seminal work, “The Georgian Feast.” Originally published in 1993, the book was awarded the IACP Julia Child Award for Cookbook of the Year. A revised and expanded 25th anniversary edition, which features new photography, recipes, and an essay from celebrated wine writer Alice Feiring, was published in October 2018. We spoke with Darra, the founding editor of “Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture” and the author of five award-winning cookbooks, about this new edition.

There was no wind and we were in the middle of the Black Sea on a bright summer day, puttering across the deep blue expanse in a chaika, a small wooden Cossack war ship that its Ukrainian sail-ors had equipped with a diesel motor. We were two days out from Yalta, and our captain, Myron, was looking eastward towards our destination of Batumi, his blue eyes glazed in a dreamy state of longing. “Ah, Georgia. Satsivi,” he sighed. “Satsivi,” he repeated sensually to Roman, the first mate, as if it were the name of a beckoning siren. “I cannot wait.” I was impressed he didn’t sob for khinkali and khachapuri like everyone else. But still, I had to quickly snuff out his reverie.

Editor’s note: We’re celebrating another year of excellent backstreets eating by taking a look back at our favorite restaurants and dishes of 2018. Starting things off is a dispatch from our Tbilisi bureau chief Paul Rimple. It was a wet, cold, gray autumn day, and we were shopping for household stuff at the East Point Mall, close to the airport, where we built up an appetite. Our home was being renovated, we had no kitchen, and the mall had a food court. We understood nothing here would taste good – the sushi, the pizza, the Asian noodles with a 30 minute wait – but were not prepared for the hideousness that passed as burgers and a chicken wrap from a world-renowned fast-food enterprise. “Of all the good places to eat at in this city,” my partner bemoaned, dropping her half-devoured chicken wrap on the plastic tray and pushing it away.

Before the tourists discovered Tbilisi, Kote Apkhazi Street was Leselidze Street, an unassuming cobblestone ribbon connecting Old Town’s bath district, Abanotubani, with Freedom Square. Home to the Georgian Synagogue, the Armenian Holy Church of Nazareth, and Father of The Cross Church, no other street represents the capital’s multi-ethnic and multi-denominational heritage better. Other than these houses of God, Leselidze hosted several religious shops, a couple of unremarkable restaurants, second-hand clothes shops and mom-and-pop groceries. No one foresaw the flocks of visitors that would invade the Old Town with their selfie sticks, but people understood the location had a future.

A customer haggles with a vendor selling freshly plucked village chickens and turkeys in Tbilisi’s Dezerter’s Bazaar. This raw, disorganized, 2,000-square-meter warren of unprocessed agrarian goods is the city’s largest open-air market and the focal point of our culinary walk in the city.

The Georgian culinary experience is all about the dinner, stereotypically a glutton’s nirvana of singularly delicious foods stacked plate by plate to the ceiling alongside beer pitchers full of wine. This might explain why, after a night of belt-popping gourmandizing, there is very little in the way of a breakfast culture in Tbilisi. Another explanation might be that Tbiliseli are not morning people. Most cafes open around 11 a.m., which is about the time our neighborhood baker is slapping his first batch of bread in the tone. Nevertheless, people do break the fast at home, often with leftover bread and butter or a chunk of cheese, or maybe day-old khachapuri.

This story starts with a hamburger, a juicy, perfectly grilled patty between a pair of fresh, no-frill homemade buns and the standard trimmings. As burgers become part of the culinary landscape in Tbilisi, we find that many cooks have a tendency to get too slick with a dish that loathes pretension. But this place, Burger House, nailed the balance between originality and straightforwardness. While sopping the drippings up with finger-thick fries we saw a hamburger story in the making and filed the idea away in our bucket list of food tales. A year or so later, walking down Machebeli Street in Sololaki, we saw a little basement joint named Salobie Bia with a Gault & Millau (a French restaurant guide) sign above the door and decided to investigate further. Several lip-smacking meals later, we learned that the chef and co-owner of this place is the same guy who was responsible for those impressive burgers.