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Food in Georgia is disgustingly cheap and equally delicious in an eat-until-you-truly-feel-like-you-will-burst kind of way.

Though the other volunteers and I make a point of exploring the city during our first few days in Tbilisi, we always return to the hotel for the free meals provided by the TLG program. This food is not bad, but it’s not great either. My favorite part is the consistent presence of dishes of assorted pastries (including cream puffs!) provided with every meal and coffee-break. The meals, however, are tiring in a way only mass produced food you serve yourself out of troughs can be, and we eventually reach the point where we must branch out.

We decide to try a small pub that some of the group spotted during one of their treks through the city. We refer to this establishment as Chaplin’s because of the spray painted picture of Charlie Chaplin on the side of the building, as well as the fact that the stylized nature of the restaurant’s sign makes it impossible for us to read the Georgian letters. 

Chaplin’s is a small cave-like establishment. From the sidewalk we descend a flight of steps to enter and the eleven people in our group along with two other small parties max out the capacity of the humid dinning room.

Nic, our resident Georgian expert, orders for the table. He and the bashfully smiling waitress huddle with their heads together choosing dishes for several minutes as the rest of us sip happily at our two-Lari beer. Some of our group orders and incredibly high quality bottle of wine for seventeen Lari and none of the dishes are priced at more than seven.

When the food arrives I indulge in a kind of gluttony unknown to me before this night. Everything is fresh and hot and incredibly flavorful. We have hen salad, eggplants rolled with walnuts and a creamy dressing, gritty biscuits and cheese, pan bread filled with beans, and, of course, Khachapuri. Khachapuri translates literally as “cheese bread.” It is thin hearty bread topped with delectably pungent cheese and baked until it is crispy on the outside and creamy and salty on the inside. It’s like Georgian pizza, if the pizza in question had been made by angels.

We eat family style, sharing every serving several ways and still leave clutching our stomachs in the hope that we might be able to hold them together at the seams.

We quickly learn that we simply can’t go back to the mass produced hotel food. There are several bakeries in the area surrounding the hotel selling delicious street food for a steal (a loaf of bread here costs about 60 tetri/cents). At these hole-in-the-wall (I mean this very literally) establishments, we buy pizzas with a kind of creamy mayonnaise, puff pastry with mushroom filling, or a kind of calzone style khachapuri. We eat on the sidewalk sipping bottles of coke in between bites, or cutting our salty bread product with apples or peaches we buy from tubs on the street. The days are warm here now, but the breezes are cool and we are too wrapped up in our meal to care how many stares our street picnic is attracting.