Editor’s note: Normally when December rolls around, we ask our correspondents to share their “Best Bites,” as a way to reflect on the year in eating. But 2020 was not a normal year. So at a time when the act of eating has changed for so many, our correspondents will write about their “Essential Bites,” the places, dishes, ingredients and other food-related items that were grounding and sustaining in this year of upheaval. Last March we loaded the car with our best cooking gear, bought enough provisions at Carrefour to fill a big red shopping cart, and headed to Garikula to ride out the pandemic in our village sanctuary. The seasonal cold winds ripped down the Tedzami Valley to shake winter off the trees; before unloading the car, we stoked the wood-burning stove to shake it out of our walls.

Back in the days when we avoided restaurants because they were mobbed with tourists and not because they lacked outdoor seating, when we greeted friends with cheek kisses and never cringed in horror when a person coughed, Vinotheca sold wine from its storefront on Kote Apkhazi Street. A few meters away, Aristaeus Ethno Wine Bar served dambalkhacho fondu at its dinner tables. The two establishments shared the same owner, Gia Darsalia, who also had a shop called Kalata that sold “edible souvenirs,” as he calls them. We liked Kalata so much we tweaked our Tbilisi culinary walk for a stop there so guests could sample artisan cheeses and goodies like gozinaki, a walnut-and-honey candy served only during the holiday season in private kitchens.

We have been watching Covid-19 sweep across the country like an invisible alien death fog claiming hundreds of lives and snuffing out businesses, one by one. Some restaurants intent on survival have changed their menus to delivery-friendly offerings of shawarma, hamburgers and pizza. To save her lunch counter, 34-year-old Naia Gabelia has also chosen delivery, but her strategy is not about what to deliver, but to whom. Amo Ra is located on the 8th floor of the Gorgasali Business Center in the Ortachala district. Since 2018, the restaurant has been serving the Center’s tenants with tasty alternatives to the neighborhood’s limited khachapuri cafés. Amo Ra’s bread and butter, however, was its catering service, prepared by a small staff of talented cooks and served in the spaces at its disposal to rent for events.

On the bottom of Janashia Street and Melikishvili Avenue in the lower Vera district, next to the staid Hotel Sakartvelo, there used to be an unremarkable joint, about the size of a matchbox and tucked into a cozy square, selling khachapuri and muddy coffee. It was the kind of place nobody missed when it closed, as we knew someone else would come along and open another uninspired khachapuri café, rinse and repeat. An Iranian couple tried breaking the jinx by opening an Italian-inspired café named Piccolo, but they eventually closed. Last year Shinichiro (Shin) and Yukiko (Yuki) Ito took over the spot and kept the name, although they offered something Tbilisi had not yet seen – Japanese street food.

Our water glasses were filled to the brim with amber rkatsiteli. After the toast, Ramaz carefully lifted his glass to his nose, followed with a connoisseur’s affirmative head tilt and knocked it back, not coming up for air until the glass was dry. “Super wine!” he exclaimed, smacking his lips and exhibiting the most sophisticated appreciation I had yet witnessed in the birthplace of wine. These were the years locals described wine as either “clean” or not. No one evaluated the nose or flavors because wine was what you washed a sagging table full of food down with, toast after toast, to the bottom, pitcher by pitcher. We judged wine by hangover intensity. The milder the headache, the cleaner – and better – the wine.

We have a Georgian friend named Besik who worked in the Sudanese desert removing landmines. At base camp he came across an old pressure cooker and copper tubing and fashioned himself a little still he filled with fermented bananas. To his workmates, Beso was nothing less than a hero, as Sudan had been dry since 1983. “But banana chacha?” we cried. “Sure,” he said. “You can make chacha from any fruit.” Technically, chacha is fermented grape pomace, but the word is also synonymous with “white lightening” and is used to describe any fruit-based spirit, including quince, feijoa and melon. There is now a flower-based chacha, too, thanks to a Tbilisi woman who has created a smooth distillation from lilacs.

Someone once said that humanitarian workers are like mercenaries, missionaries or madmen. It is a description we have also applied to expats who end up in far-flung places like Georgia. Like the foreigner out in the secluded Kakhetian village of Argokhi, between the Alazani River and the Caucasus Mountains, who has forged his life growing a nearly extinct variety of native wheat and baking it into bread; but he is no madman. He’s a Frenchman. We had first heard about Jean-Jacques Jacob some years ago while visiting the Alaverdi Monastery in Kakheti, when a friend pointed north of the giant cathedral and told us of a Frenchman who had started a farm in the middle of nowhere.

Someone once said that humanitarian workers are like mercenaries, missionaries or madmen. It is a description we have also applied to expats who end up in far-flung places like Georgia. Like the foreigner out in the secluded Kakhetian village of Argokhi, between the Alazani River and the Caucasus Mountains, who has forged his life growing a nearly extinct variety of native wheat and baking it into bread; but he is no madman. He’s a Frenchman. We had first heard about Jean-Jacques Jacob some years ago while visiting the Alaverdi Monastery in Kakheti, when a friend pointed north of the giant cathedral and told us of a Frenchman who had started a farm in the middle of nowhere.

Editor’s note: Inspired by our Wine Clubs in Tbilisi, Lisbon and Athens and the grape harvest season, we have asked our correspondents to share the stories of winemakers and wine shops that are making a splash in their city for our Wine Week 2020. We are in Terjola, Imereti, sitting at a cozy front-yard table under a womb-like gazebo of intertwined grape vines, and our host Gia Chubinidze has brought another pair of bottles for us to try. We had already gone through a host of whites and were moving on to his reds. “This one had 14 days of skin maceration,” he declares of his 2019 otskhanuri sapere with a nose of black pepper and licorice. It is outstanding wine, like everything he has poured for us, but then Gia is no ordinary winemaker.

We pull off the recently finished section of highway at the Argveta exit in Imereti, follow Google Maps to a hand-painted sign directing us along a bumpy lane to an open iron gate with painted flowers, and park our car as if we live here. The front yard is lush with fruit trees, children’s toys are neatly scattered about, and a hammock under the shade of a large walnut invites us to lounge next to an enormous stone table. Before we sit here and never get up, Giorgi Zhorzhorladze steps out of his neat two-story house trimmed in red bricks, greets us with a warm “Gamarjoba!” (“Hello there!”) and welcomes us inside, to another realm.

In 2013, Anthony Bourdain and the Parts Unknown team arrived in Batumi, the capital of Adjara, to shoot the first segment of their Georgian adventure. The show’s producers invited Zamir Gotta, a Russian sidekick unfamiliar with the city, to join him. They visited a casino, strip club and mediocre restaurant for khashi, tripe soup, which failed to impress Bourdain. When the episode aired, local social media users flamed with disappointment over the Batumi portion in particular: “Casinos and strip clubs! That’s not Batumi!” While they aren’t the places we would have taken Anthony Bourdain, they are most certainly Batumi, along with the rainy summers and stifling subtropic air, the new five-star hotels and crumbling Khrushchyovkas (Soviet apartment buildings), a McDonald’s housed in an award-winning modern structure and a chacha-spouting fountain that dried up shortly after it was built in 2012.

Take the plunge into the high-volume hubbub of Tbilisi’s famous Deserter’s Bazaar and you’ll come under a three-senses assault. The piquant aroma from the spice stalls, a butchers’ shouting war and stalls swinging with burgundy-brown, candle-shaped churchkhela sweets. But on one side of the market building, there’s a small slice of calm – in the long corridor where the cheese sellers work. Selling homemade cheeses from across the country, delivered fresh every day, is a more relaxed and deliberate business. You’ve heard of the Slow Food movement. Perhaps it’s time we were more specific and talked about “slow cheese.” Here, the cheese sellers prefer to wait for the customers to come to them.

It was a scorcher of a summer day in 2002, and we were pushing our broken Russian motorcycle and sidecar through crowded Plekhanov streets with a gnarly case of cotton mouth. Dripping in sweat, we limped up to the kiosk by our building and slipped some coins to the lovely Irma for a lifesaving cold bottle of Borjomi mineral water. She reached into her little fridge and passed a bottle to our trembling hands. We twisted it open, took a deep three-gulp pull and grabbed our neck in a panic, alcoholic vapors steaming from every pore of our body. Gasping, we handed the bottle back to her. “This is not Borjomi,” we wheezed. She sniffed it and jumped back. “Oh sorry. That is my husband’s spiritus,” she explained, replacing it deep into the fridge with a real bottle after checking it first.

We met Tega at a friend’s dinner table shortly after moving to Tbilisi in 2002. Tall, debonair, with dark puppy eyes and an ever-present Colgate smile, Tega made it a point from that first meeting to take us under his wing and introduce us to the best Tbilisi had to offer. That was how we first ended up at Salobie, near the ancient capital of Mtskheta. “This place is famous for its beans,” he said. “And its name is Beans!” he chortled (lobio means “beans” in Georgian, and salobie is “house of beans”). The restaurant felt like something between a museum and a summer mountain resort. We were in the original dining room, built next to a giant 300-year-old wooden house from Racha.

Last week we stopped at Prego, a Georgian-owned Italian restaurant, for an extra-large pizza paradiso, a delicate thin crust brushed with a light tomato sauce and baked, then topped with thin slices of ham, fresh tomatoes and shredded lettuce, and sprinkled with fresh parmesan. For summer, there isn’t a more refreshing pizza pie. We were the only seated customers and had to wait around 30 minutes for the kitchen to finish an enormous two-scooter delivery order. We might have grumbled had this not been July 2020, when a global pandemic has every restaurant owner in the country gnawing their fingernails to stubs. We were happy to see that our favorite place for pizza was serving at all.