I work from my flat, so it is no wonder that I am sick of it.

But I am also sick of working for no pay, of my increasingly strident craving for appointment, convenience and privacy, and of reproachful stares from Georgian friends who ask how my Georgian is coming along and I would speak so much better if I just moved to my mom's house in the country and made more Georgian friends and how come I don't visit ever? I am weary — arg! arg! — of delicious twists of savory khinkali, of buying cheap and flavorful fruit from old women with solid racks of gold teeth, of emerald-green Tarragon soda, of the evocative deteriorating terraces and winding quiet cobblestone alleys in Old Tbilisi, and of feeling the city get a little warmer and more golden as Spring takes hold.

Are there birds flitting past our balcony at dusk? Bleuuugh! Lofty stone churches resonant with antique chanting? Bah! Friends gathered at supra to toast and sing and drink one another under the table? Humbug! A trip to Armenia tomorrow to stay at an off-season luxury hotel with sauna, pool and billiards in the middle of a gorgeous alpine landscape? Piffle! Pish tosh!

How convenient — no. How absolutely soul-and-sanity-saving-ly, sourpuss-smotheringly necessary — that in less than a week I fly to the US to spend almost three weeks in New Jersey with my Dad. Ah! Cafés within bookstores within shopping malls, glossy New Yorker magazines stashed in the bathroom, productive eavesdropping, men with backpacks, women in sweatpants and sneakers, front lawns, fast-food, Ben & Jerry's, dark beer, dinner dates, rude strangers, estranged neighbors, hippies, preppies, goths, yuppies, nerds, geeks, punks, freaks, ethnic and cultural hodge-podge m'godge HERE I COME!

There's 24 hours in that visit home when I will be vying for a fellowship. That 24 hours will will be difficult and sweaty-palmed and interesting - I will probably have a very looong entry about my humiliation and defeat — or triumph and glory — once it's over.

I sent in my graduate school decisions. Anyone wait-listed for IU, New School, or Syracuse will be happy to know that I'm bound for NYU's Cultural Reporting and Criticism Journalism program come September. It's by far the hardest, brainiest, most toughen-you-up-and-get-you-published-est program of the lot I was admitted to, and really I wanted to go to graduate school to shape my wet soggy brain into something steely and lethal and my tentative prose into a marketable and professional portfolio, so I'm going to go for it. Soaring student loans and the infamous NYC real estate market are in my future, so help me god. I can't wait.

Labels: Georgia

In the bottom drawer of the dark cherry wardrobe that stands in my mother's kitchen, nestled between sweet-smelling beeswax candles and soft cloth napkins, lies a nine-by-nine-inch square of wood, air, and dull white cotton thread. This plain bamboo mat is my mother's sushi-roller. Sixty-eight cylindrical staves of smooth bamboo lie side by side in neat rows, orderly as a plowed field. White cotton string winds around each stick in a soft chain, biding them all together at the neck, chest, waist, knee, and ankle. The thread holds the sticks together, and holds them apart; the sushi-roller is a smile of gaps and teeth. Though tightly bound, the mat is supple, and may be laid flat or rolled, like wrapping paper. A few dry, translucent flecks of rice, left from the last time my mother made sushi, cling stubbornly to the flanks of the bamboo. The bleached cotton thread shines against the blonde wood like white teeth in a tanned face.

Antique crockery dwells in the higher regions of the wardrobe. I know where each stack of dishes and each cluster of glassware comes from. The thin china plates and crystal wine glasses were given to my parents when they married. My grandmother won the blue-velvet box of tarnished silverware on The Price is Right. My mother's great-aunt made the lace tablecloths. I do not know where the sushi-roller is from. I know that it belongs to my mother, but am reluctant to inquire any further. I feel as though asking after the origin of the sushi-roller might suggest that it does not belong where I find it.

Posted in full at LostWriters.net >>

Labels: Lost Writers

I was copy-editing this morning, when I came across a curious spiel about the health benefits of Green Tea. After extolling Green Tea's promise as an anti-cancer agent (evidence: "Japanese and American scientists say"), a weight-loss aid (evidence: few fatties in China and Japan), and its potential to vivify the Georgian economy, the writer got to his point:

"The time has come to state the purpose of this letter: it is to promote the development of a tea growing rehabilitation program in Georgia, and to request that the government of the USA invest in its implementation and purchase the final green tea products for the prevention and treatment of weight gain for their corpulent population."

This made me inexplicably happy.

C and I took an overnight train to the Black Sea coast this weekend to spend our 1-year anniversary walking around Batumi—an off-season resort town with a very strong post-Soviet flavor.

Our train pulled in shortly before 7 AM, and we had the first few hours of the day to ourselves. We left the new Batumi train station (which is a very modern construction made mostly of glass and brushed stainless steel, and, like the new Tbilisi airport, there are pools of water on the floor from the leaking roof) and took a 50-tetri marshrutka to downtown Batumi.

We found one barely opened café, took in a little Turkish coffee and some pastries. Walked the boulevard. Got a hotel (the Hotel Montpelier, which had piping hot water and a very big suite for $80 - hooray for off-season rates).

There is a reason why it's hard to find information on Batumi online. There isn't a lot there. Not that I minded. With the sad aquarium, budding theme-park, and nearby Roman fortress all closed, and the weather patently inappropriate for sunbathing, I didn't feel at all bad about spending most of the day walking slowly up and down Batumi's sea-side public boulevard (est. 1881 or 1884, depending on whether you believe the LP or the sign banning livestock and unmuzzled dogs from the park).

Later in the day, there was a minor gauntlet of gypsies begging by the entrance to the boulevard, and lots of long-lashed teens making out on the public benches, but when C and I were walking at first in the morning, the only people out were people patently out for their sea-side constitutionals: people exercising in public (!), which I haven't seen much of on the main streets of Tbilisi. There are benches all over the place. The metalwork on these is in an art nouveau style, but many of them include www.batumiboulevard.com among their tendrils of weathered-looking metal, betraying somewhat more modern origins. (Interestingly, there is no active website at that address. Strange that the city managed to turn out several hundreds of benches, but no website).

The sky was grey and the sea was grey, too, but there were lots of palm trees and the weather was balmy. Our marshrutka ride back was unexpectedly harrowing, but we made it. And now we are back. And it is still cold.

Brrr.

Rumor and hearsay told of a magical, mobile Indian restaurant that, over the past decade, has flitted, Brigadoon-like, through such diverse locations as Sololaki, Vake, and Saburtalo. This transient establishment – which had a tendency to shut down and reopen without warning or explanation – was called the New Delhi.

Buzz around the New Delhi was promising. A gourmand friend in the Peace Corps reported that it was dressed down, but tasty and authentic, and pointed out its approximate location on my woefully inadequate purple plastic Tbilisi city map. People referred to it as “the” Indian restaurant, and as recently as the autumn of 2006, “the” Indian restaurant was spotted in Saburtalo.

I was saving my trek to Saburtalo for a rainy day. Unfortunately, my rainy day fell after the New Delhi had pulled up its roots once again. After hours of beating the pavement and ducking in and out of patently Georgian restaurants on Gamrekeli Street – where the New Delhi last opened its doors—I was forced to accept that I’d missed it. The New Delhi had moved on.

My quest for the New Delhi had made me a bit myopic about this week’s column. It had to be about Indian food. Had to. And so I headed to what I believe is now the only Indian restaurant in Tbilisi: Maharaja.

It was with slumped and defeated shoulders that I entered Maharaja. I despondently took in its muted Asiatic wood-and-fabric decor ordered a mango “lassy.”

The lassi was pert and refreshing, and promised a good consolation meal. I called for backup. When backup arrived, we checked out the menu, which to our surprise was only in English. This seemed a bad sign, but we went ahead and ordered vegetable samosas, “palak panel,” keema (ground mutton) curry, and chicken masala.

The vegetable samosas (GEL 3) were served with a side of ketchup – another bad sign—and a small dish of watery mint chutney. The samosas themselves were filled with a texturally adventuresome mix that seemed to include chickpeas, potatoes, raisins, walnuts, peas, walnuts and cilantro. They were certainly nourishing, but a bit on the heavy side. The “palak panel” (GEL 8), known elsewhere as palak paneer, featured plump cubes of soft white cheese swimming in emerald-green spinach sauce; this was a pretty dish with good mouth-feel, but it was a little bland. The chunky chicken masala had a decent kick of spices to it, but the chicken was tough – a far cry from the creamy, tender meat I was hoping for. The keema curry was quite a bit like a meat chili, but perhaps it was supposed to be that way.

Maharaja is a very pleasant and cozy restaurant. Though their dishes – at least the ones we tried – fell short of scrumptious, and the service was a little cold, the restaurant interior is sumptuous and intimate, with low lighting and rich textiles providing a nice dining environment. Main dishes (GEL 12-20) come in modest portions – definitely order a side of bread or plenty of rice to make this a substantial meal.

And if anyone knows where the New Delhi has gone – or if it is coming back – please spread the word. Email info@georgiatoday.ge with “New Delhi” in the subject line.

Indian Restaurant “Maharajah”
24 Akhvlediani (aka Perovskaya), Tbilisi
Tel: 99 97 99
Published in Georgia Today, 16 Mar 2007.

Labels: Eating in Tbilisi, Georgia Today

In February, C and I went to Gori, Imereti and Kakheti with Imedi TV to participate in a segment on Georgian hospitality for their Droeba program. The gist of our participation was this: we would, one by one, knock on the doors of strangers and ask for water. We would gage their hospitality by

1. Whether they gave us water;
2. Whether they invited us to stay for wine or a supra;
3. How persistent they were about item 2.

C wrote a very funny essay for Lost Writers about our trip; read that if you want to know more about it. I want to write about the MEAT.

After we'd gone through the "Knock Knock" routine in Kakheti, our mark, a 70-year old kind-faced man named Gurami, made a fire in his yard from dry grapevines. The flames licked the air in six-foot flames, then dwindled to a bed of coals. Just as the fire subsided, seven skewers of meat were set on an iron rack that held the pork a few inches above the shimmering coals. When the meat was pronounced "done," it was put in a bowl, sprinkled with coarse salt, and tossed with rings of raw red onion. We sat at a table in the yard, filled our glasses, drank a toast to hospitality, and dug in.

There may have been silverware on the table, but we ate the mtsvadi with our hands. The grilled meat, fresh off the fire, was warm and slick in my fingers. The thick ropes of fat striating the flesh had turned buttery over the fire. I reached for a piece and a very organic smear of something white and soft from somewhere between bone and tendon—a shmear of hot marrow?—glazed my knuckles. I considered a moment, then licked my fingers.

I've eaten mtsvadi in many restaurants in Tbilisi—they've been best at the Marjanishvili Shemoikhede Genatsvale, and Championebi on Tamarashvili street reportedly has good grilled meat—but nothing so far has come close to equaling melting hot meat fresh off the fire, piled in a huge heaping bowl, eaten en plein air.

Man cannot live off of mtsvadi alone. I realized this in an, er, visceral sense when, in 2003, I went on a camping trip where our guides fed us mtsvadi all weekend. The meat traveled in a vinegar marinade (making it technically basturma, not mtsvadi) and when it came off the fire, our friend Sergo would impress us all by manfully crushing pomegranate seeds over the steaming meat with his bare hands. By the end of our trip, one young woman was sick from eating so much pork (she's a vegetarian now, thanks to that experience) and the rest of us were constipated for a week.

But after Gurami's supra, more grape vines were added to the purple-orange-white bed of coals to freshen the fire for another round of mtsvadi. This round was for Gurami's family, some of whom had missed the first supra. As the camera crew packed away their equipment, my head full of raw white wine, I extended my cold hands towards the quick, dry column of fire, wishing we could stay.

* * * * *
A recipe for mtsvadi, which seems to have been cribbed rather shamelessly from Darra Goldstein's book The Georgian Feast, is available at About Georgia.

Labels: Georgia

After too many days of feeling a little blue, a little homesick, a little tired of the apartment and each other, C and I went for a four-hour walk around Tbilisi.

I put on my Dad's old Levi's jacket, my army-green carpenter pants, and my black-rimmed geek glasses and left the apartment looking maybe a *little* like a squat Asian freak among the statuesque (or somehow statuesque-seeming) Caucasians of Tbilisi, but comfortable and determined to cover some ground.

The walk took us up Rustaveli Avenue, up through Vake, and eventually into Saburtalo. On our way, we went through Vake Park (a 558 acre public park), 40% of which seems to be taken up by a huge fountain/memorial that includes a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a 1976, 92-foot tall "Statue of Victory," and a dramatically tiered (though currently scuzzy and still) fountain. On the way down, C counted 335 steps from top to bottom.

A young man was playing with his Pitbull in Vake Park. There was a branch about 5 feet off the ground, with a short length of rope dangling down. The dog kept jumping up and chomping down on the rope. When it did this, it was suspended in the air, and would sometimes swing back and forth like the pendulum of a clock, or would describe rapid acrobatic parabolas (think chopper blade) in the air. There was a small amusement park with some very old, and some very new rides. We saw a cat napping in the sun by one of the older, closed kiddie-rides.

A busy but pedestrian-accommodating street connects Vake with Saburtalo. On the way there, we passed "Championebi's," reportedly a very good place to come for mtsvadi. There was also a hand-written sign, advertising "khashi dilas 7-saatistan" (Khashi mornings from 7 AM). Khashi is a Georgian hangover remedy that, according to one source, consists of "a thick bouillon made from cow’s hooves and offal that have been rubbed in corn flour and boiled for 12 hours over low heat. The dish is served steaming hot with lavash bread and a carafe of vodka." (Needless to say, C and I will be checking in for khashi early one of these mornings.)

Got lost trying to find an Indian restaurant that may or may not still exist. Our friend Shane gave us good directions, but that was way back in September, and the avenues are wider in Saburtalo & the buildings taller and more generic than in our end of town, plus the street names are unfamiliar. After an hour of fruitless wandering, C and I split a candy-bar (misleadingly labled "nuts" -- it was basically a snickers bar with NO nuts inside - Boo!) and hopped a metro home.

Now my feet hurt, but I don't have depression any more.

Labels: Georgia

If you aren’t yet sick of khinkali – the super-ubiquitous Caucasian boiled dumpling – Khinklis Samqaro (“Khinkali World”) should be next on your list of places to eat some.

How many varieties of khinkali are there in Tbilisi? I’ve counted 11 so far – 10 of which are available at Khinklis Samqaro.* Of the 10 khinkali varieties on the menu, about half are various combinations of meat and spices named for different Georgian regions or towns. Of these, the best is indisputably the khinkali sapirmo, the dumpling de la maison (50 tetri per), whose juicy meat filling is mixed with onions, spices and chopped tarragon. The tbilisuri, another city-style dumpling with chopped herbs mixed with the meat (40 tetri each) is also quite good.

Vegetarians won’t have to sit on the sidelines at this sakhinkle. The restaurant offers four varieties of meatless dumpling. There is a creamy khinkali khachoti with fresh milk curds (40 tetri each) that is intermittently available (sometimes the kitchen runs out of khacho). On a good night, these have a fluffy filling somewhat like a cottage cheese-cream cheese hybrid. (Some friends reportedly had some khachoti on an off night, when the filling was a bit sour). Also good are the qvelit with cheese (50 tetri each), which come with sour cream. Fasting friends may also enjoy a platter of turbaned khinkali sokoti (with mushroom filling—40 tetri each) or kartopilit (potato filling—30 tetri each) served with a side of margarine.

All of the dumplings are freshly made, and well-formed (some to the point of appearing almost sculptural – the khinkali qvelit in particular are dramatically molded, and cluster on the plate like exotic seashells).

For those seeking refuge from khinkali (there is such a thing as too many), Khinklis Samqaro has a wide-ranging menu that extends far beyond dumpling territory.

If you’re a meat-eater, don’t miss the khbos chashushuli (stewed veal – GEL 4.50), which comes, still bubbling, in a hot ceramic dish. Subtly flavored in a lovely thick tomato-based sauce, the meat is tender and melts in your mouth. You’ll want to eat basins of it. The badrijani nigvsit (aubergine with walnuts – GEL 3) is also superb. These are lightly fried, then rolled into bite-sized wraps with a spread of herbed garlic and walnut paste. Other items worth a try are the gebjalia (GEL 2), pillows of soft sulguni cheese in a sumptuous spiced mint, cheese and cream sauce. The aromatic and addictive sokos ketze sulgunit (sulguni cheese-stuffed mushrooms caps broiled on a hot plate) is served piping hot, sizzling in its own juices. The mushrooms, at GEL 10, are at the high end of the menu – most of the other plates are less than GEL 5 each. (The jigari – an offal plate – is reportedly excellent, but I haven’t had the, ummm, guts to try it yet.)

Khinklis Samqaro is on Dadianis street off of Tavisuplebis Moedani. The restaurant, which you descend to from street-level, is usually not very busy on weeknights, but fills up on weekends. The dining environment is casual. There’s beer on tap, good wine available, and the usual bottled beverages for sale.

Menu in Georgian. No English spoken; be prepared to make your way in Georgian or Russian.

* The remaining sulguni variant is at Chilikas Bichis Dukani.

Khinklis Samqaro
Dadianis 12 (Off of Tavisuplebis Moedani). Tel: 893 27 44 12
Published in Georgia Today 2 Mar 2007.