Tbilisi stores and markets are festooned now with distinctive sausage-shaped candies called churchkhela, ready for New Year celebrations and then Orthodox Christmas on January 7. They are a very traditional Georgian specialty, usually homemade from grape juice thickened with flour and nuts.

Editor’s note: Tbilisi was a new addition to Culinary Backstreets this year, and as we look back on all the great eating we did in 2015, we can’t help but notice that so much of it took place in the city's Sololaki area. There’s a typecast in Georgia that when somebody wants to go into business, they open up a khinkali restaurant. There is a logic to that. About a million people live in Tbilisi, a city built impetuously along the hilly banks of the Mtkvari River. And the adoration every single one of these people has for this boiled dumpling is so reverent, it is as if they see Jesus and his disciples feasting on a steaming platter of kalakuri khinkali for the Last Supper as they bite a hole into the dumpling and slurp its tasty broth.

Editor's note: This is the first installment in our new monthly series, Tbilisi Sketches, with illustrated dispatches covering local spots in Georgia's capital. Contributor Andrew North is an artist and journalist based in Tbilisi who spent many years before that reporting from the Middle East and Asia.

In the Caucasus, guests are considered gifts from God. Georgians like to call them okros stumrebi – “golden guests” – an endearment that illustrates the stature the ever-hospitable Georgians give to those they host. And whenever our own golden guests come to visit in this remote corner of the world, we never fail to entertain them in our own surrogate dining room, Shavi Lomi (the Black Lion).

The 19th-century homes in old Tbilisi neighborhoods were built in a style Georgians call “Italian Courtyards,” where through a gate or arch you enter a quad enclosed by stories of balconies shared by each family on the floor. This courtyard was the nucleus of each building, where kids safely romped around, monitored by adults from the windows above, as men contemplated domino moves at a table under a tree and women beat rugs on an iron rack in a corner.

We are sitting under the tonic canopy of an enormous pine tree in a hidden Tbilisi garden, licking our lips over menu items that are neither European nor Georgian. When our dining companion informs us she will not share her trout tartare with adjika (highly concentrated spicy red pepper paste), we realize there will be no plate-dipping tonight. Just as we settle on our main courses, a woman in a blue chef’s jacket comes up to our table, beaming bonhomie, and asks if she can help us in any way. This is Tekuna Gachechiladze, the blue-eyed Tbilisi chef dedicated to changing the way Georgians understand their food culture. We are sitting at her latest culinary venture, Cafe Littera.

In a land with no breakfast culture to speak of, a couple slices of khachapuri and a cup of tea or coffee are all it takes to fuel you up until suppertime. If you need a snack to carry you over, you grab a pie at any one of the hundreds of khachapuri stands in Tbilisi, and no supra – feast – is complete without an “Imeretian” or “Megrelian” pie for every three people at the table.

With cafés popping up all over the country, from the arty boutique coffeehouses of Tbilisi to the Lavazza kiosks in villages like Zestafoni, it is easy to forget the humbler days of Georgia’s coffee culture, when an “Americano” was a chemically enhanced instant coffee powder in a stars-and-stripes-emblazoned packet added to a cup of hot water.

Last week we had a hankering for baked brains, and in Tbilisi that used to mean only one thing – a visit to Alani, the Ossetian restaurant near the sulfur baths in Old Tbilisi. The venue is named after the ancient North Caucasus kingdom of the Alans, ancestors of the modern-day Ossetians; one might think this unpopular in a country that lost a war against Ossetian separatists (and Russians) in 2008, but the fact that it is highly regarded is testament to Georgia’s paradoxically tolerant nature. Of course, it helps to have consistently quality cooking too.

Ènek poured a rosy-colored splash of wine into our glasses, avidly explaining how this particular Aladasturi grape vine was meticulously cultivated in its native west Georgia. In a tasting ritual uncommon in Georgia, we swirled it, sniffed it and savored the flavor as it caressed our tongues. Here in the “cradle of wine,” the land where viticulture is believed to have originated 8,000 years ago, wine is customarily poured into a water glass and “tasted” in one long drag, until drained. But in this cozy cellar in the heart of Tbilisi’s historic Sololaki neighborhood, seven winemakers have come together to offer an alternative convention to winemaking and consumption. They call it Vino Underground, but we call it wine heaven.

It was in 2007, when, on a hunger-induced whim, we called a friend and asked him to meet us for lunch at a new place that had been beckoning from a Rustaveli Boulevard side street for some weeks. Tbilisi’s main drag was bereft of quality, low-priced eats, and the down-home warmth wafting down the street offered the promise of good fortune. This was before the homey little joint was known, a time when our party of two could occupy the eight-top under the window instead of the surrounding cozy, semi-enclosed booths.