The smart amongst you will know I have mixed up my Georgians within the blog title, but the seeming style of Georgian food both in terms of

• the era, where a typical high end household’s “light” breakfast might have consisted of eggs, kidney, chops, liver, kippers and kedgeree as well as fruited spice breads, cakes;
• the country, where mountains of robust hearty fare seems the norm (it is more mountainous that Switzerland, with an average height above sea level of 4,698ft)

could be said to suggest both lean towards the impressively grandeur in terms of food quantities.

Now I know a bit (not much, but a bit) about Georgian wine (allegedly where the glorious thing called wine first started) and attended recently a fascinating tasting at Mystere Wine Club where the theme was the “Cradle of Wine“,

which included a Georgian number (seconds from last on the right) but I know bugger all about Georgian food.

So when a Georgian restaurant rather unexpectedly (like to have been a fly on the wall to see the bank manager’s initial response to the business plan) opened up in Cardiff city centre it had two clear plus points for me:

• Georgian wines, which for a wine geek like me is always going to pique my interest; and
• A cuisine that is new to me.

After J had cancelled multiple times (appointments for ear plucking, nail tanning, eyebrow French polishing or something like that) our diaries (well hers and Mrs. SF’s – mine is usually free if truth be told) aligned on a Friday evening. With none of us having ever been to a Georgian restaurant, this place seemed to fit the bill as an interesting venue for a first night out in a while. As such, a table was duly booked.

The menu stays true to the hearty robustness of Georgian cuisine, where “fancy dan” foams, espumas or spherification seem to be very much an anathema. Hearty fair was certainly the order of the day with both starters and mains on the menu.

At first sight it all seems a bit spenny and there is certainly some odd pricing in play. For instance, since when has pork been pricer than lamb

and there seems to be loads of prices with pennies in the mix. So 95p, 80p 70p added to the pound price which on the standard mark up model seems a bit odd.

I have to say none of the starters really floated our collective boats and as a result we decided on a boat shaped bit of bread loaded with cheese, egg and butter instead.

At £18.95 for essentially loaded bread, the acharuli was at first sight surprisingly pricey. It came with a warning on the menu that it would take up to 30 mins to cook from fresh so we decided to just have it as a side with the mains rather than as a traditional starter (it didn’t take 30 mins, with them explaining that that warning was to cover them when it gets busy).

What arrived was one of the best bread dishes I have had in a long time,

with a veritable boat load of cheese (imeratian, which tasted like a cross between mozzarella and feta) topped with an egg yolk and copious quantites of melted butter.

We were instructed to mix the egg and butter into the cheese and what a glorious thing this was, with a fantastic cheese pull (photo sadly lacking) as we took our alloted (by me) pieces

The bread itself had a nicely crisp crust and a pillowy interior. It was a truly lovely thing and so it should be for the whopping £18.95 price tag.

It came as part of the table load of food that arrived all in one go, with us ordering the sharing platters for 2 (£47.50) and the tsitsili tabaka (a chicken dish at £25.80 – another example of some odd pricing here).

The platter was a cornucopia of meat, with a mix of chicken, pork and lamb matsvadi/mtsavadi (chunks of meat grilled on skewers, flavoured with onion, pomegranate and a spice mix) and a jumbo minced meat kebab

Really nice mix of meat which had that lovely char which worked particularly well with the pork matsvadi. The minced meat kebab was a mix of pork and beef, with a good fat (where there is fat there is flavour) content.

Pomegranate seeds and red onion, which were scattered across the top, brought a welcome bit of acidity to the dish. The tanginess of the pomegranate seeds worked particularly well here and also added a pleasing textural contrast.

The platter came with a side of chips 

a small salad and two dips.

The chips were a bit non-descript and I think substituting them for some of the unadorned boat shaped bread (shoti- £3.50) would have been a better option, especially as there were loads of meaty juices in the bottom of the bowl just begging for a bit of bread to mop them up with (chips sort of did the job, but it’s not the same).

The salad was fresh and crisp, but lacked dressing (we used some of the meat juices) and was a bit on the diminutive side.

Both sauces, a satsebeli (punchy tomato based) and the tkemeli (sour plum) worked really well with the meats. On balance, my favourite with the platter was the tkemeli (its sourness was a good foil for the meats), but both were good.

The tsitsili tabaka was a spatchcock poussin, with a beautifully crisp, spiced, crust to the skin

beneath which was nicely tender and juicy meat.

It came with potato wedges (I liked the copious amounts of dill with these), which were much better than the chips, a scattering of red onion and pomegranate seeds, the same sauces as the platter (in this instance the tomato one worked the best) and the same side salad.

All in all a very hearty and pleasing meal and we were full enough to pass on desserts, which looked very cake orientated

A mate went another night and did try the dessert

which he said was nice.

I also liked look of the fish dish he had

Back to pricing, another oddity is the cheese.

Bearing in mind the cheese course at the Ritz in London (hardly a cheap place) is £33

this seemed very, very spenny although it does include cured meats (so maybe idea is come in for this and a bottle of wine perhaps or as a shared starter rather than as an end of the meal course). You would hope it would be absolutely huge for that price tag.

The wine list is exclusively Georgian, which is no bad thing as they have an abundance of good and interesting wine.

There are a few by the glass (with coravin and the like tech I think it should be all),

but once you get into the bottles costs can escalate rapidly. Prices top off at a very hefty £158.90 for the Usakhelauri (the name of the grape, as far as I am aware).

Now for that price I don’t think it is  unreasonable to have the producer (there opening the bottle for you) and vintage details on the list.  I have seen wine from this grape retail at prices ranging from €60 up to a whopping £899 so there is clearly a wide range in “quality” and for anyone who chooses a wine at that price point based on just info re the grape I have a bridge and some magic beans to sell them!!

We decided to kick off proceeding with a white, which was a blend of mtsvane and kisi (no me neither) grapes from £33.25 (retails at £17.99, so a very reasonable mark up)

Nice wine this, with an nose of white blossom followed by  tropical fruit as it opened up in the glass, and a peachy freshness (still very much at the dry end of the scale) on the palate.

Worked very well on it own and with the chicken.

With the meat platter, we moved onto a red wine in the form of a saperavi (the grape, which I have had a few times before).

Again a nice wine, with a big hit on the nose of dark berry fruits (blackcurrant and black cherries) with a fair bit of toasty oak. On the palate the tannins (often aggressively firm in a saperavi, a wine which tends to need a bit of age before it all come together) were quite well integrated with a big hit of black berry fruit overlayed with vanilla. Very pleasant wine this, which worked very well with the meats in the platter and the cheese, eggy, buttery, bread. Price wise, it was £44.40 (again those odd ten pennies) and retails at around the £17 mark (much bigger mark up than the white, which is odd, but still pretty reasonable for the UK).

My advise would be don’t be too worried if you don’t know much, if anything, about these wines as the descriptions on the list are pretty fair and the staff are happy to chat about the wines.  As such, if you tell them what style you like then I am sure they can give you a good suggestion.

I would, however, ideally like more info regarding the wines producer and vintage wise. Notwithstanding this, both wines we had were very pleasant.

There is a Georgian beer and a thing called doki (that sounds interesting)

and the inevitable cocktails. It seems it is now illegal not to have a cocktail list, with (probably) it being the first thing the Licensing Board look at (no Long Island ice tea, no license for thee)! The obsession the younguns have with them, whilst actively shunning wine (bottled sunshine), is a complete and utterly mystery to me.

The verdict

We all really enjoyed our meal here and at £169 (sans a tip) for an abundance of food and two bottle of good wine it was actually a bit cheaper than I thought it was going to be (these days sub £65 a head including a decent amount of  booze and a tip for an evening meal out is actually not too bad in my book).

There are some price anomalies, on top of the odd pennies addition to the price of various dishes.

As good as the bread was, £18.95 (as opposed to an unadorned shoti bit of bread priced at a mere £3.50) did seem steep, as did the £35 cheese platter (off puttingly so in respect of the latter) .

One thing I would do is ditch the chips, with the shoti bread and/ or other pots (the ones that came with chicken) much better options.

The wine is really good, but at the prices they are charging (having said that mark ups are generally fair) they really should be providing more info (producer and vintage). To my mind you simply cannot have a wine on a list for £150+ with no  producer or vintage details.

Notwithstanding these (albeit minor) quibbles, if you are looking for a hearty,  no-nonsense, tasty,  meat oriented meal, with good wine, this place certainly fits the bill. Iron out some of the pricing glitches and what you have is a pretty good addition to the Cardiff dining scene.

The details

Address: 21 St. Mary Street, Cardiff, CF10

Website:  https://share.google/azZsT8OXFnV90iWRW

Opening hours: