Georgia Part 7: Observations about food, drinking, and driving

Eating and drinking seem to consume the vast majority of Georgian’s time and attention (evidence: on New Year’s Day, Basa’s first day off in about a month, he was called in to work on urgent business. He rushed to work to find that the “urgent business” was a full bottle of vodka and a small New Year’s feast). With food as good as theirs, it’s understandable. While I’m no food critic, and thus lack the vocabulary to write beautifully about food, I’d like to try to describe a few of my favorite Georgian dishes. I found recipes for many of these dishes on this blog, though I have yet to actually try any of them out.

• Khachapuri – see part 3. In all I tried standard khachapuri, Mengrelian-style, Royal Mengrelian-style, and Ajara-style.
• Cucumber and tomato salad – yes, this sounds simple enough, but add ground up walnuts, parsley (actually, the more general term “greenery” was used), onions (which I always picked out) and sometimes bell peppers, and you’ve got a light and tasty starter to balance all the meat, bread, and cheese that’s loading down the rest of the table.
• Gomi – this is basically boiled cornmeal with soft cheese melted into it. VERY tasty. And white – Georgian corn is white, not yellow. Goes excellent with…
• Satsivi – chicken in walnut sauce. To die for. This with gomi is my favorite Georgian dish of all time.
• Mchadi – Georgian cornbread. It’s fried. Good with things that require dipping, especially…
• Lobio – the general word for “beans.” However they make them, they’re always really tasty.
• Shashlik – “this is actually Russian,” they’d always say as they dug in to this roasted meat dish. Typically beef, pork, or veal. I avoided the veal.
• Kabab wrapped in lovash (tortilla-like flat bread) – Really loved this because it reminded me of the sausage Dadoo made when I was a kid.
• Georgian tvorog (farmer’s cheese) with mint. – I forgot the Georgian name for this dish. But it goes great with mchadi.
• A variety of carrot and cabbage concoctions. The most important element is walnut paste. It makes everything delicious.
• Churkchelo – a string of walnuts or hazelnuts which has been dipped repeatedly in concentrated grape juice and allowed to dry to make a confection. Yummy.
• Khinkali – boiled, juicy meat dumplings that “must” be eaten with your hands (“When George Bush visited Tbilisi, he LOVED khinkali,” they told me more than once). First you bite a little hole in the dumpling, suck out the meat juice, then finish eating it, leaving behind the “bellybutton” of pure crust. Good covered in pepper; when they’ve gotten cold, you can send them back to the kitchen to be fried for Round 2 of eating. I can eat about 4-5 khinkali if I’m really hungry; I heard tale of a Georgian man finishing off a tray of 30 after claiming, “I’m not really hungry.”

While we’re on the subject of not being hungry: no one ever seemed to believe me when I told them I was full. They thought I was jus saying that to be polite. Basa was all the time saying, “Don’t be shy! If you’re being shy on my account, I’ll leave!” But really, I was just full! As time went on, I got better at both slowing down at the beginning of the meal so I wouldn’t fill up so quickly (makes sense when dinner goes on for 3-4 hours or more), and at refusing more food.

And while we’re thinking about gorging, the 30 khinkali story is not the only story I heard about eating food in mythical quantities. Eliko’s dad, Avto, ate an entire suckling pig on New Year’s Day. Temuka told of a friend who, after several hours of feasting, made a bet that he could eat 15 whole quail (I’m pretty sure that’s the bird they were talking about: tiny, with edible bones, and VERY greasy). He proceeded to eat the 15 quail, plus two extra, just to prove that he wasn’t “just” finishing the bet. Basa told of a man who ate 60 pelmeni at one go. These stories baffle me – clearly it is a source of pride and evidence of manliness to be able to eat a ton, but I just don’t see the appeal of gluttony.

• Khashi – this is the only food in Georgia I categorically dislike. Rezi assures me that many Georgians don’t like it either, but it is touted as extremely healthy, good for your joints, and a sure cure for a hangover. It’s cow hooves and stomach in broth. It cooks for a long time and smells awful, then you ladle this dreadful mass into a bowl, add a ton of garlic and salt, take a shot of vodka, and eat up. It was the texture of the stomach that got me most. And if I let myself think about the fact that it was stomach, I couldn’t swallow it. I didn’t try any hoof. I’ll try anything once, and I’m glad I’ve had the experience, but I won’t be upset if this was the only time in my life I have to eat khashi.

Drinking and eating are closely related activities in Georgia. Most families have grapevines in their yards and make their own wine, which tends to have a lot more “bite” than commercial wines (also tends to be unfiltered, which I suspect may be why it gave me a headache). In restaurants you can by local wine on tap. I’ve already talked about the importance of toasting and the other rituals that go along with drinking in Georgia. I’d just like to mention here that I was overwhelmed by the frequency of drinking. Granted, I was visiting during the holidays. Nonetheless, I was unprepared for wine at breakfast, for example. I was always surprised to find the boys already hard at it when we got to Basa and Inga’s, whether we arrived at 3 PM or at 5. I’m jumping ahead to the end here, but I was completely bowled over in Tbilisi when Basa ordered a (small) bottle of vodka to go with our khachapuris. AT SEVEN AM! When he ordered a second bottle a couple hours later at a different café, where we were waiting for some friends, I brought it up to Rezi. “Why order that bottle if we’re not going to sit here very long, and you and I don’t want to drink?” “We’re sitting at a table,” Rezi explained. “If you’re sitting in a group around a table, it doesn’t feel natural to him to not be toasting. He feels uncomfortable and disrespectful if he doesn’t invite you to drink with him, no matter what time of day it is.” I love Basa, and Rezi’s explanation of his morning drinking makes sense to me, but I am so glad I’m dating the son and not the father. Rezi’s not a big drinker – his metabolism is so high that he always ends up with a hangover before the night is even over, so he tends to drink the minimum he can get away with (or at least he did while I was around).

Driving is another part of life in Georgia that takes some getting used to (and which may make a believer out of me. Miraculously escape death enough times…) For one thing, no one wears seatbelts. Wearing a seatbelt, they reason, is like asking to be in a car accident. The lines painted on the road are taken as mere suggestions, and I often saw four cars abreast where there should have been two, passing in no-passing zones, U-turns being made in front of on-coming traffic. Lots of last-second braking. Rezi and I took taxis a lot to get around town, and I often just closed my eyes and squeezed his hand, because if I was going to die, I didn’t want to see it coming. The scariest part for me is that they drink and drive all the time. They understand that drunk driving is dangerous, but they don’t consider getting behind the wheel after “just a few” as drunk driving. The roads in Batumi were of varying quality. Larger roads tended to be pretty smooth, but we went down some side streets with potholes practically as big as the car we were in. Rezi’s street, though located in the center of the city, is unpaved. On our drive to the waterfall in the mountains, there was a distinct cut-off point up to which they’d resurfaced the road, and after which was extremely bumpy. And pedestrians beware – you do NOT have the right of way. Cars will honk, but they won’t slow down, and if you don’t jump out of the way, it’s your own fault. Batumi cracked me up with their crosswalk signals – which they only had at intersections in the touristy part of town – because they turned instantly from green to red with no warning blinking, which could easily get you stuck in the middle of the street. Seems like they haven’t quite thought that one out yet.