Spring arrives in Vera on the tail of supsarkisi, annual southern winds that whip down Mount Mtatsminda and roil the winter apathy out of our homes and bones while blowing the city’s smog to kingdom come. Then one day near Easter, all the plum trees in the neighborhood simultaneously burst with white blossoms. A couple weeks later, all the chestnuts down Belinski pop in green. No other Tbilisi neighborhood says spring better than my Vera.
I was walking our dog Ramzes, welcoming deep mask-free drags of the season now that COVID-19 regulations have been lifted, and we passed the garage cage where Shalva used to sit like a hookah-smoking caterpillar on a wooden bench, watching the four little corners of our streets. Nothing got past him.
“Milk? Why did you buy milk?” he’d ask me with a contemptuous smirk.
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Shalva’s posse would join him in a daily ritual of slapping dominos on a worn wooden table until it was time to lay the newspaper and indulge in bread, pungent cheese, pickles, and wine or chacha from reused plastic Coke bottles. Heaven be damned if I happened to be walking by.
“American! Come! Sit!” Shalva would order.
“OK, but just one,” I’d say wincing. The chacha ambush. There was never “just one” and no escaping it; to do so would have been extremely lowbrow.
Chacha is technically grape brandy but also refers to any fruit hooch. It is usually around 120 to 150 proof. Shalva would fill a greasy, lip-marked water glass with about 100 grams and slide it to me. Next came a toast, usually to friendship, and we’d knock them back. I’d say “Thank you, gotta run” and they’d say “No, no, no! Not yet!” and fill a second shot for my other leg. The next toast might be to American and Georgian brotherhood and I’d say “Thank you, but I have to go to work now.” “Work?” they’d guffaw and fill a third glass because in Georgia three is a sacred Christian number. This toast was often for good neighbors and we would laugh at the jerk who lived next to me. Counting stopped after that. It was charming the first 50 times, but after a couple years it got to the point where I had to duck under the cage and sneak up the hill. When Shalva departed this world his friends disappeared, too. His son replaced the stools and table with a silver Mercedes.
Ramzes and I were on our way to Jean-Jaques Jacob’s bakery, Au Blé d’or. The Brittany native has a farm in Kakheti, east Georgia, and is one of the few people cultivating the near-extinct heritage wheat, tsiteli doli, a victim of Soviet industrialization which put many indigenous crops under the plow. Jean-Jacques used to sell his bread and organic produce from a trailer in the Vake district then rented a storefront here in Vera. Lucky us.
Vera is one of Tbilisi’s oldest districts, first documented in the 13th century. While Tbilisi’s Old Town and neighboring Sololaki have developed to accommodate the growing number of tourists, Vera has remained a local’s neighborhood of 19th century red brick buildings, even after Rooms Hotel arrived in 2012 and sparked a process of gentrification. Before, we had only one restaurant in the hood. Rainer’s is a guesthouse/ beer garden/ pizzeria, offering everything from sausages and sauerkraut to beef tartare and goulash soup. Rainer Kaufmann, a bold German journalist smitten with the country during the Soviet period, opened the place in 1995, when Tbilisi was still smoldering from civil war.
If Vera’s options for dining out were a weight-watcher’s delight, its opportunities for drinking out were an alcoholic’s utopia. Bar culture arrived in Tbilisi in the mid-1990s with the Heineken Pub on Perovskaya Street (now Ahkvladeli) in Lower Vera, and by the mid aughts there were well over a dozen pubs on these tiny streets. There were very few watering holes elsewhere in the city. Even on a Sunday night, you would find people dancing on the tables to a cover band slashing the chords to Sweet Home Alabama, Another Brick In The Wall, and a half-dozen Beatles tunes. Nali, Csaba’s, Wheels, and Buffalo Bill’s are some of the old pubs still here, although order “a vodka” now and the bartender will pour a shot and not give you a bottle.
Thai massage parlors arrived on Perovskaya about 10 years ago, providing a “sin strip” vibe, but there’s also a good burger joint, a few cafes, a fine pizzeria, and Cream Bar, a remarkable ice cream parlor making alcoholic sorbets. Alubali inherited the old London Pub, expanding its botanical patio dining room and serving some of the best eats in the city. The focus is Megrelian cuisine, spicy and gutsy west Georgian fare made with the freshest of ingredients. Sulguni cheese, evocative of mozzarella, is made on site. While the wine list offers carefully selected natural vintages, you can also order a glass of delicious house wine, too.
Ramzes didn’t know we were going for bread and yanked me off course to our regular stop. You don’t truly appreciate a great wine shop until it is a few blocks from your house. Giorgi “Kicha” Kbilashvili opened Wine Boutique three years ago and has filled his shelves with a superb selection of mostly family-produced wines from some of the country’s most exciting artisans. Back before real Georgian wine was bottled and labeled, we had a neighbor, Gia, who delivered good wine in aluminum kegs to various Tbilisi restaurants from his father-in-law’s winery in Kakheti. He’d fill our 5 liter plastic bottles for a few bucks. This was in 2004 when there was no talk of a wine’s nose, notes, or complexity. There was no custom of sipping a glass with dinner or with your feet up reading a good book. Only fancy restaurants had stemmed wine glasses and these were filled to the brim, toast after toast, which all men were compelled to respect by draining each time. “Good wine” meant you could down a couple liters at a feast without having a nasty hangover. “Bad wine” was exported exclusively to Russia.
Au Blé d’or is on Zandukeli street, which begins down at McDonald’s and along its 500 meter stretch we find some of Tbilisi’s most exciting places to sip and sup. Self-taught chef Ramaz Gemiashvili honed his skills baking desserts and delivering them by bicycle in the 1990s. Then he opened the city’s first coffeehouse before experimenting with traditional Georgian recipes at Citron Plus. Six years ago, he opened up Keto and Kote in an historical building above the Rustaveli metro. It is classic Tbilisi charm inside the renovated 19th century dining room and outside in the garden with a menu of contemporary Georgian cuisine.
At the opposite end of Zandukeli, below the street in a basement apartment with a secluded garden patio, Sulico Wine Bar pours from an extensive wine list and serves the best tolma (stuffed grape leaves) anywhere in the world. Owner Baya Tsaava was displaced from Abkhazia in 1993 with 250,000 other Georgians, spent a decade in Chicago driving a taxi, among other things, and has always been an imaginative cook. Her menu sings flavors and includes a beyond savory lamb empanada, walnut stuffed trout wrapped in grape leaves, and the cluster bomb of all desserts, lava cake with feijoa sorbet, a sweet South American fruit cultivated in west Georgia..
Across the street from Sulico is Shavi Coffee Roasters. When I first came to Georgia in 2001, a real mug of joe meant a little porcelain cup of “Turkish” coffee. An “Americano” was chemically enhanced instant coffee powder in a stars-and-stripes-emblazoned packet. We had a bean dealer on Belinski who sold beans in plastic buckets labeled with dubious monikers such as Mambo, Nescafé, and Pelé. If we wanted a cappuccino, we’d have to go to The Marriott or Prospero’s, an American-owned bookshop-cafe. Then, in 2016, Ruben Avetisian began roasting beans on Perovskaya and rocked our world until Covid-19 trashed his health and killed his business. Last year, Ryan McCarrel and his wife Lolo Tovo opened their on-site roaster cafe.. You don’t have to be a serious aficionado to appreciate Shavi, but if you are, you won’t want to leave.
Zigzag west, up and down Vera streets you might bump into Tartan Cafeteria, which has the most perfect gvezeli–rolls stuffed with cheese, beans, potatoes, or ground beef. On the next street, Tbilisi’s queen of cuisine, Chef Tekuna Gachechiladze, opened Akura San, a wine bar with Japanese-inspired dishes for pairing. Tekuna and her winemaking husband Irakli Bluishvili prove how versatile Georgian wine is.
A few blocks away is Chef Tekuna’s cooking school, Culinarium, in the monumental Wine Factory No. 1, a late 19th century complex designed by Alexander Ozerov, a prolific local Russian architect. It is a multi-functional space noted for storing 40,000 bottles of 200 year-old wine, including cognac said to have belonged to Napoleon. There is also an open-air cinema, Tekuna’s taqueria, Teko’s Tacos, and several Georgian restaurants, most notably Veriko and Shushabandi, while Cocktail Factory is the first local bar I have ever had an authentic dry martini in.
With a loaf of sourdough tsiteli doli bread and a bottle of tsitska-tsolikouri under my arm, Ramzes pulls me up the hill and onto Gogebashvili. She sniffs the corner where Vova used to park his taxi, an old gray Lada with a photo of his German Shepard on the visor. “Do you have a dog?” he would ask me every time I got into his car. “You need a dog. Dogs are good. My dogs are pedigree, see?” And he would snatch the picture of his dog and show me. “I’ll give you a good price for one of his puppies.” He congratulated me on Ramzes, who I explained was a “Mexican Shepard” with a wink.
Gogebashvili has seen a lot, for sure. This was where the zveli bichi, the district’s “bad boys” used to hang in the 90s. Georgian gangbangers, but with Kalashnikovs. The French embassy used to be here, there was even an ATM, which was the first sign the neighborhood was changing until it was removed 15 years ago. There was an old tone bakery on the corner. Tones are tandoori-like ovens and every neighborhood has them, but this one would also roast sucklings for New Year’s Eve. People would stand in line in the cold clutching their piglets by the leg.
A few years ago there was a sushi takeaway next to the mom-and-pop shop the size of a closet, yet which somehow has more products packed inside than the supermarket chain down the street does. Sushi on Gogebashvili? I live two blocks away and called for a delivery, not because I’m lazy. I knew that anything was possible in Vera, I just needed to confirm that everything was, too. Twenty minutes later a scooter came bouncing up the hill past Shalva’s garage with a California and unagi roll. “Pretty cool,” I thought.
