Hungry traveller.
View over the old town of Tbilisi at dusk
Bunches of wild asparagus sprout next to a fish tank teeming with trout. Wheels of cheese weigh down a Lada to its bumpers, and strings of dried apricots dangle from the vehicle’s wing mirrors. As the crow flies, Dezerter Bazaar, Tbilisi’s main food market, sits within 200 miles of the borders of Russia, Turkey and Iran. It shows. Tehrani-style street stalls sell spices such as blue fenugreek and bee propolis (also known as bee glue – a sticky mixture bees produce to mend their hives). The indoor section of Georgia’s largest market – a Soviet-era maelstrom of giant pumpkins, pickles in oil drums and braying beasts – vends wild tea foraged near the Black Sea.
The bazaar juxtaposes treats you couldn’t pair in Georgia’s neighbouring countries. The spices of Arabia are displayed next to an entire row of fresh suckling pigs. Alcohol is sold with such abandon that during my hour-long stroll I was strong-armed into sipping four homemade wines and two shots of chacha, a grape pomace brandy known as vine vodka, which clears the tubes like liquid nitrogen. Pistachios are bagged and sold by Asian nation of origin – Uzbek, Azeri, take your pick. The most memorable section?
That would be the cheese. There is guda, a sheep’s cheese ageing under a sheepskin to guarantee a farmtastic tang. And dambal’khacho, a mould-covered quark wrapped in paper, aged underground, then served seared in hot butter. Plus nadugi. That’s a cheese inside a cheese: a ricotta-like curd wrapped inside a thin, silken slice of another kind of cheese called sulguni.
There are plenty of healthy offerings too, such as tklapi (fruit leather) made from fresh plums, peaches or apricots, which are cooked down to a paste that’s then spread on a plastic sheet and air-dried. Torn-up bits of sour tklapi can be used as a throat lozenge. Sweet ones are lobbed into a stew. Half the ingredients and dishes I found can’t be nibbled anywhere else in the world.
FANATICALLY FOODIE
Long-time resident Paul Rimple summed up Georgia’s crossroads cuisine for me on his Culinary
Backstreets Food Tour (culinarybackstreets.com):