“Dolgorukov Street? Two Aaa?”

“Yes!”

“Three Lari.”

“Let’s go.”

The composition at the entrance, which is located in the middle of a most usual street with some soviet type high-rise buildings  and of course, laundry put to dry on their facades, immediately puts you into the right mood.

We enter.

We pass through a verandah with two cabins and get into a tiny room without any windows and full of tables. Only after you visit the toilet and actually see a proper bathroom with a typical bathtub and everything, you realize that some time ago this used to be a normal apartment on the ground floor. They just cut a portal towards the street and here it is – the restaurant.

We take a seat at the verandah in a wooden cabin, which is densely covered with chess, icons and all sort of things. It’s as well equipped with a TV so you can watch contemporary Indian films, which immediately attracts your attention – but only till the moment you find an old man, looking like a true movie character, sticking into the window behind your shoulder.

“Oh there’s a TV, so we can watch a film!” He says with a strong Georgian accent.

This man had a teleport effect on us, exactly as the ratatouille in the eponymous animation film did on a gastro-critic who bore the same name as I do.

Immediate stupor, but only for a split second, and …

… I don’t feel those 15 years that have passed since I was in Georgia for the last time. Moreover, I feel like I’ve never left.

They bring the food.

At first all these: cheese (I don’t remember the name) with cream and mint, delicious cheese, but not exactly my thing.

Then, attention please, there was a corn “flatbread” with cheese inside (chvishtari). But actually I’ll lie if I say it was a flatbread. It was a huge pie with lots of cheese. A tasty one.

Then began the gastro-rape™.

The owner served us her version of satsivi™. Mummy, get me back in your tummy! (c)

So there’s a bowl and inside of it there’s a sea of tepid sauce “bazhe” (by the way, it isn’t as fat as it is in all the Georgian restaurants outside Georgia), and you have hot roast chicken cut into big pieces inside this bowl. What you get has nothing to do the usual rot rubbish but literally a whole chicken, which easily breaks like caramel and has crunchy thin skin.

And it comes in this SAUCE! Can you fucking imagine the scale of this fucking mess? And, as they say, one should also dip the “flatbread” in it. Ok, I’ve run out of words trying to explain it. Now I better go to find some new ones.

Still it was not enough and our “play” went on: chicken tapaka appeared on stage. If you remember, this type of chicken after its death gets hammered by an iron hammer to a condition of a flatbread covered into some iron skin. It’s more like the poor thing takes the last revenge on man so he couldn’t gobble it up that easily.

But here you quite unexpectedly get this.

White meat, which isn’t anyhow affected by rancid over-roasting but is indeed thoroughly fried so that the small bones are safely edible. And all over on top it has thin, frangible, crunchy skin, which is semitransparent like burnt sugar from your the childhood.

In short, a disaster!

In addition, we had all these.

If someone ever spoke to you about the Georgian restaurants “the-same-as-in-Georgia” (c), don’t believe them just like you don’t believe in such restaurants outside Japan, Thai, India.

Honestly, you’d better get on the plane. It’s worth it.