Georgian Cooking Meets Georgian Cooking in Bold New Old Tbilisi Restaurant
It’s one of the odd overlooked things about Tbilisi, another one of the details, the kind of thing you’d miss amidst the snow-capped mountains in the distance on a clear day or the mist-draped mountain looming above the rooftops under autumn rain. It is exactly the sort of thing that you could count on a chef to notice, though. There’s rosemary; everywhere.
It’s wild throughout the Caucasus, at home on bare slopes and dry, rocky cliffs waiting for hikers. Rosemary in Tbilisi comes native and planted both, the sea-green needles and lilac flowers climbing up to Narikhala and spraying out beside the white roses politicking on Rose Revolution Square. Grant Freeman used to run his hand through those bushes, on Rose Revolution, as he’d pass, rubbing the leaves to carry a bit of the scent with him. It’s one of his favorite herbs, he says.
“People seem to use rosemary as decoration, but never cook with it,” he explains. “It’s something you can find very easily – my cooks have even told me that you can find dried rosemary – but nobody sells fresh rosemary. So I just thought, yeah, this is something that I want to use in my cooking – and it’s a beautiful sounding name as well, and it has an amazing flavor.”
Unlike rosemary, Freeman isn’t native to Georgia – at least not the Caucasian one. He was born in Savannah, Georgia, in the US, and raised between Atlanta and Chattanooga, at the southern end of the low, rolling Appalachian Mountains. After nearly a decade living as a professional chef, he decided he wanted a change, and came to Baghdati to teach English for six months. That was four years ago.
That the food here piqued the young chef’s imagination shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. “From a culinary perspective,” Freeman says, “I just decided I should do something, I want to do something, but I didn’t know what.”
That “what” turned out to be Rosemary, one of the most quietly exciting new restaurants in Tbilisi. Freeman approaches the classics of Georgian cuisine like an eager student discovering a new language; studying it, exploring its rules and quirks, and toying with it all gleefully, unrestrained by native familiarity. The result is a mix of Kartvelian classics with a Dixie accent, and Southern fare with a Caucasian twist. His hallmark is creative simplicity, though; a down-home rusticism that runs through everything from ingredients to décor to prices; there’s no sense that he’s overplayed his hand. It is a great hand, though, and the food as arrives is exactly what’s promised; Georgian food meets Georgian food, curated by a master chef.
Perhaps as surprising as the food is just how easy it was to get the business off the ground. The idea of opening a restaurant hadn’t even been Freeman’s, originally; one of his students had a cousin who knew Freeman was a chef, and decided he wanted to be an investor in whatever restaurant Freeman wanted to open.
“It took me a couple of days to think about it, because it’s a big commitment,” Freeman said, “and when I said yes, we started getting the ball rolling – and you know, it’s Georgia. When Georgians decide to do something it starts happening right then and there and you’re kind of just along for the ride sometimes.” And it was certainly a fast ride. Freeman and his partner started discussing the restaurant only a year ago, things didn’t really start moving until nearly this summer, and the bulk of the actual work, including the significant renovations needed for their new space, was all crammed in to August and September. “That was probably the biggest hurdle,” he said. “We had a very tight timeframe because we didn’t have the biggest budget to begin with – so we needed to get our workers in here and doing the work, frankly, if possible 24/7.” He means that near-literally: building codes proved less trouble for the renovation than after-hours noise ordinances did.
Indeed, though South and Sakartvelo might complement each other gastronomically, one does seem to have an advantage over the other for entrepreneurs, and Messrs. Trump and Obama alike will doubtless be disappointed to learn which one. Georgia’s efforts to streamline its bureaucracy and keep its regulatory framework business-friendly have clearly paid off. “We went through the Justice House and I’d say an hour and half later we were a business. It’s that fast. They come in, they have people who speak English and can help walk you through it, they show you what you’re setting up, they talk to you about it and get all of your information and as long as you’ve got your ducks in a row it’s – bing-bang-boom! – you’re done and now you own a business.”
Freeman’s started a business before, in Chattanooga – the city’s first food truck (sadly, not choo-choo themed) – and to hear him talk, even that was a much longer and more involved process than setting up a full brick-and-mortar establishment here. “There’s a lot more codes in place in the US,” he says, “a lot more bureaucracy.”
That over-regulation doesn’t stop with the filing papers. A certain western “squeamishness”, as Grant puts it, has helped set Georgia’s culinary landscape far apart and above its cousins. Unhampered by either excessive regulations or a cultural mistrust of what comes out of the earth, Georgia produces fresher, tastier, more local ingredients, and a wealth of handmade, “artisanal” food products for its chefs, for a fraction of the price they’d fetch in Europe or America.
“And I’ve got to say it, that’s one thing about this part of the world,” Freeman admits, breaking into a smile – “people aren’t so afraid about a homemade sausage.”
He’s extra excited about those sausages. The menu’s only about 15 items long; he’s already had to cut down from around 40, and is still developing more. Those spicy, homemade kupati sausages, for instance, have designs towards forming the base of a genuine Kartuli biscuits and gravy. Fried Green Tomatoes – as Southern a dish as it gets – are already on the menu, served with achika and Svan arajani, but since Freeman only wants to use local and fresh ingredients, they’ll have to come off the menu as fresh tomatoes go out of season. Once they do, though, he plans on replacing them with Fried Pickled Green Tomatoes, combining the uniquely Black Sea-Georgian pickled green tomatoes with the distinctly Golden Isles-Georgian tradition of fried pickles.
Other menu items already exemplify that same sort of playfulness, mixing and matching in simple ways to create brilliant new tastes. Freeman’s Badrijani Nigvzit is, sure and steady, eggplant with walnut – only the eggplant is cut into long sticks, battered in mchvadi cornmeal and deep fried, served with a walnut dipping sauce. Forget Tbilisi; you half expect to be seeing that pop up at pit bbqs across Appalachia in no time.
Sometimes the boyish punning is obvious; Freeman calls his take on Satsivi, made with braised chicken and served hot, “Satskheli” (“We’re committing a bit of a sin playing with that,” he sheepishly admits, with a sort of 12-year-old’s devil grin). Other times innovation is simply in using local ingredients that don’t normally end up on the local table. Crawfish is found all over the country, but doesn’t play much of a role in Georgian cuisine; at Rosemary, you’ll find them melting buttery out of the Crawfish and Sulguni Polenta Fritters.
Freeman jokes that one of the most important rationales behind Rosemary’s name is the fact that it already ends in an “I” sound (“Maybe 95% of Georgians change my name to Granti, and to be honest I really don’t like that…”), but of course there is something wildly appropriate about having this restaurant named after an ingredient so ubiquitous in the Georgian landscape yet so absent from the Georgian kitchen. Freeman’s far from the only chef pushing the boundaries of what Kartvelian cooking means these days – he ticks off a list of chefs he’s following while we talk, people messing with everything from wild truffles to centuries-old cookbooks – but it’s hard not to get a little bit extra excited by the novelty of a Georgia boy giggling his way towards a Georgian-Georgian fusion cuisine, in a tiny little old town restaurant looking all the world like it was picked up and plopped down here from somewhere off some Peachtree Street.
Anyways, it’s exciting to me, and I tell him so – it seems like something new. He just shrugs. “To be honest, at this point in my life? Tbilisi, Georgia is more my home than Atlanta, Georgia,” he says. “It’s hard to think about whether you’re breaking new ground when you’re just trying to make good food.”
Adress: 41 Vertskhli St., Tbilisi
Robert Isaf