Mapshalia Restaurant, Tbilisi: Standing in Line for Georgian Classics
On Aghmashenebeli Avenue in Tbilisi, a line regularly forms outside an unremarkable door, and it spills out onto the sidewalk. They're waiting for lunch: bean mash, cheese bread and a soup thickened with walnuts.
Mapshalia (Georgian: მაფშალია) is a cheap Tbilisi eatery serving Mingrelian food and one of the best places to eat your way through Georgian cuisine in a single sitting. The portions are big, the prices small, and locals outnumber tourists at the tables.
Mingrelian Cooking on Aghmashenebeli Avenue
Samegrelo (Mingrelia) lies in western Georgia on the Black Sea, and its cooking has a reputation across the country for being rich and generous. Mapshalia claims that tradition, though it is only fair to admit that the one genuinely Mingrelian item on the menu is khachapuri megruli - a round cheese bread that differs from the more common Imeretian version in having the cheese not just inside but baked onto the top as well; the rest of the menu is cooked all over Georgia. What the name Mapshalia itself means I never managed to pin down - Mingrelian is a language in its own right, not a dialect of Georgian, and it gives up its words reluctantly. Its reputation, on the other hand, is a matter of record: Forbes Georgia put it among the best restaurants in Tbilisi - not bad going for an eatery where strangers will happily sit down at your table.
What to Order at Mapshalia
Walnuts turn up in nearly every dish here - the signature of Georgian cooking. Lobio is a thick bean mash with cilantro and raw onion, and it comes with bread and pickled vegetables. Pkhali grinds cooked vegetables - spinach, beets or eggplant - with walnuts, garlic and herbs into a firm spread. Kharcho is a beef soup thickened with walnut paste, and no two households on the same street will agree on the one correct version. It is filling home cooking, the kind you used to get at the lunch counters in butcher's shops back home in Czechia - only with cilantro and a heap of walnuts added.
The star of the meat section is ostri, spicy beef braised in tomatoes. Grilled meat on a skewer is called mtsvadi in Georgia, but in Tbilisi you will more often hear the Russian shashlik - to the quiet dismay of ethnographers, who keep the two traditions carefully apart. And if you want the great Georgian feast in miniature, order pkhali alongside your khachapuri - both dishes have their place on a supra table too.
The Line, the Cash and No English
Mapshalia is small and its reputation is big, so the line outside the door is part of the deal - but it moves fast and the wait is worth it. The staff are all women, not one of them speaks English, and yet nobody has ever gone hungry here: goodwill and pointing do the job of a dictionary well enough. Bring cash - paying by card was not an option when I was there.
The Table I Kept Coming Back To
I worked my way through plenty of places in Tbilisi, but I didn't go back to any of them as often as I did to Mapshalia. Bit by bit I ate through almost the entire menu: excellent lobio with a bowl of spicy vegetables, spinach pkhali, a big plate of pork shashlik buried under raw onion, kharcho with its walnut paste, and ostri, where the meat fell apart on the tongue and the seasoning didn't put a foot wrong. Lobio and pkhali were 5 GEL (1.80 EUR) each, shashlik and ostri 7 GEL (2.40 EUR) each, kharcho 8 GEL (2.80 EUR), and the priciest thing I ordered, khachapuri megruli, 11 GEL (3.80 EUR). Every time, I left with a plan for what I would order next.
Mapshalia
