Palmebi

Khinkali and khachapuri by the railway station

Palmebi is in Chughureti, on Gia Kancheli Street, a ten-minute walk from the railway station square. The name is simply the Georgian word for palms. The quarter here is working and plainly urban rather than grand, and that is exactly why the restaurant sits in it so naturally.

The menu rests on a simple idea: good Georgian food without ceremony. Khinkali are made both in the city style and in the Mtiuleti one, with caraway and ground pepper, and there is a separate version with potato and sulguni. There is Adjarian khachapuri and the layered kind, mtsvadi of pork and of chicken, lobio with mchadi and pickled pepper, chikhirtma on chicken broth. Beside them a burger and a caesar sit without the slightest contradiction.

Desserts are a story of their own. Behind Palmebi stands the Tbilisi bakery Honoré, so after khinkali it makes perfect sense to order doughnuts with vanilla cream or a chocolate cake with ice cream. At some point they stop being merely the end of lunch and become a part of it in their own right.

The street the restaurant stands on carries the name of Gia Kancheli, one of the best known Georgian composers, who wrote the music for Mimino and Kin-dza-dza. There is something very Chughureti in that: beside the railway station, in the middle of ordinary city life, you come upon a place with good food, a history of its own and a reason to stay at the table longer than you meant to.