Restaurant Review: Georgia's Feast

By Noelle Mateer

Images by Holly Li

The reason we returned to Georgia’s Feast is this: Я только что обнаружил Грузинский ресторан в Пекине, спасибо #thatsbeijing за это!#хачапури!!!!

It is also this: ес, я несколько ночей не спал, думал о нем. А тут открываю журнал, а там статья про этнические рестораны стран шелкового пути. Ура!

We do not speak the language of the above Instagram comments. But Google Translate does, and what it told us is that one Instagram user is really, really excited about Georgian food.

“I just discovered a Georgian restaurant in Beijing, thanks #thatsbeijing! #khachapuri” he says. Then: “Some nights I did not sleep, thinking about it. And then I opened this magazine, and there was an article about ethnic restaurants of Silk Road countries. Hooray!”

Before we continue, let’s get one thing straight: don’t confuse Georgia’s Feast Georgia with American Georgia. Georgia’s Feast Georgia is a small, former Soviet country bordering the Caspian Sea. American Georgia is a state whose official state fish is the largemouth bass. Now that’s out of the way, let’s address #khachapuri.

Khachapuri (pictured above) is freshly baked bread folded over thick, gooey cheese with a soft egg yolk on top. It is such a staple in Georgia that some cities measure their economic standing by the price of one – the Khachapuri Index. This may explain why, some nights, this dude does not sleep thinking about them.

When we ate our first khachapuri at Georgia’s Feast last month, we were obsessed. We could not stop thinking about its heavy cheese. Its egg yolk dripping all over the hot bread. Its fatty richness exploding on our taste buds. Its sticky mass moving its way down our esophagi to rest languidly en masse at the base of our stomachs. We did not sleep thinking about it.

So we return, and a wooden statue of a wrinkly old man welcomes us at the entrance. Inside, the restaurant’s wooden beams and wide windows make me feel like we’re dining in a low-rent Central Asian castle. There’s an elk head mounted on the wall. We can’t tell if it’s brilliant or cheesy.

Well, it’s definitely cheesy. The khachapuri (RMB68) is great – but others disagree. (It’s a tough idea to swallow, literally, for many in this traditionally cheese-averse city.) The salmon salad is dull and uninspired (RMB48). The lamb shashlik (bits of seasoned lamb on a skewer, RMB68) is tasty, but overpriced. And it’s hard to enjoy the dry Georgian lamb dumplings (RMB18) when you know there’s a tastier, juicier Inner Mongolian equivalent down the street.

We don’t mean this to be a reflection on Georgian cuisine as a whole – this is only one restaurant, after all. What we are saying, though, is that you’d have to be pretty confident to put a new spin on dumplings and lamb skewers in a city filled with so many fantastic ones. The team at Georgia’s Feast doesn’t quite make the cut.

And thus we learned an expensive lesson: stick to the #Khachapuri. That khachapuri though – it’s enough to make us say Ура.

2 Sanlitun Beixiaojie 朝阳区三里屯北小街2号 (8448 6886)

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