GEORGIA ON MY MIND

In Georgia, visitors are considered gifts from God. Georgians call them okros stumrebi , or ‘golden guests’, and are the epicentre of each experierience in the ever-hospitable country.

Nowhere is this reverence for hospitality more palpable than Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital. As the city sheds its Soviet past, abandoned factories have been converted into modern bistros, crumbling yellow terraces open out to leafy organic wine bars, where cracking a bottle is met with a hearty toast to ‘the land, the food, the people’.

And the food you ask? You can taste the world in the local dishes. Their traditional flatbread is baked in clay ovens, similar to a , broth-filled dumplings, rival Hong Kong’s. There’s a host of young chefs forging a retelling of Georgian culinary traditions, and several winemakers are bringing back the 8,000-year-old method of production, which involves storing wine in clay vessels underground.