Most Recent Posts

Tucked between Russia and Turkey, the Republic of Georgia is renowned for great food: cheese dishes, pickles, breads and stews. This is a cuisine that you should not miss.

And on summer evenings in the capital, Tbilisi, the air is fragrant with the smells of one of Georgian cookery's highlights: grilled meat, or shashlik.

You can find good shashlik at restaurants with white tablecloths, but the very best in all Tbilisi is said to be at a roadside stop called Mtsvadi Isalamze. It's an unassuming place with rows of wooden picnic tables in an open yard.

The grill is a brick hearth where Giorgi Kavelashvili follows the traditions of his native Kakheti, the easternmost province of Georgia and the nation's wine country. Kavelashvili is 19, but he grills with absolute confidence, because, he says, "In Kakheti, everyone knows how to make shashlik. So I studied it from my childhood."

One of the secrets, he says, is the wood.

Here, shashlik is grilled on burning grapevines. Kavelashvili demonstrates by hefting a big bundle of grapevines onto the hearth and setting it alight. The vines burn quickly, leaving a heap of finger-sized coals that he rakes into an even bed of fragrant heat.

"Georgians, and especially Kakhetians, know from very, very ancient old times that only [this] type of wood is much more better to make shashlik," explains Nani Chanishvili, my guide and translator. She's a linguist, a professor of the Georgian language and a connoisseur of Georgian food.

What the Georgians of ancient times discovered, she explains, is that the aromatic smoke and high heat from the vines seal in the juices of the meat.

Perhaps the best test of the griller's skill is how well he cooks kebabs made from finely minced meat, usually lamb, that's mixed with spices and squeezed by hand onto the skewer.

Good timing is everything, because Kakhetian kebabs are cooked very close to the coals, and it's easy to overdo them.

Giorgi's kebabs pass the test perfectly: They are juicy and full of flavor from regional herbs, spices and sweet-smelling smoke. They come served with fresh, chewy Kakhetian bread and, of course, Georgian white wine.

Why white? As Chanishvili explains, Georgians like to drink a lot of wine when they speak — and "that means, only white wine, only white," she says, "because it is not possible to drink, for example, four, five, six, seven liters of red wine — then you will be dead. That's not right. But white [wine], yes, you can."

Chanishvili doesn't drink much herself, but she insists that her father could drink as many as 14 liters of white wine during a single feast. Then again, a real Georgian feast is an event that can go on for 12 hours.

According to Georgian tradition, that time should be spent enjoying food, making long and witty toasts, reciting verse and singing.

But be warned: Even 12 hours wouldn't be enough time to sample all of Georgia's delicacies, especially the best of the country's shashlik.

Unfortunately," says Chanishvili, "it's not possible to eat everything."

The book then leaps across decades and states to Burbank, Calif., where we first meet young Clifford, who lives with his unflaggingly upbeat mother and stroke-afflicted father, "Like flies trapped in amber, the three of them stuck / Like so many others dealt cards of rough luck." In a particularly lovely passage, Cliff's mother correctly susses her artistic son's sexuality when she informs him that there will be both male and female models in his drawing classes:

Remembrances

David Rakoff: 'There Is No Answer As To Why Me'

We have news this Monday that automaker Nissan is reviving the Datsun name for the Indian market — where the larger auto sector is struggling.

The new Datsun Go — priced at below $6,700 — doesn't look like the iconic 240z, which for many years was the top-selling sports car in the U.S. Here's an old ad for it:

A beer cocktail quaffed around the world for centuries is quickly becoming America's "it" drink of the summer: shandy.

Traditionally, a shandy consisted of beer mixed with equal parts lemonade or ginger beer or citrus soda. But these days, bartenders are pushing the boundaries with inventive mixes, like fresh fruit purees and syrups, from rhubarb to apple and maple.

And major beer manufacturers have also jumped on the shandywagon, rolling out their own bottled versions from brewers like SAB Miller subsidiary Leinenkugel, Traveler Beer and Sam Adams. Worldwide, the number of shandy product launches more than tripled between 2009 and 2012, according to research firm Datamonitor. Manufacturers are also mixing up traditional shandy flavors, such as Leinenkugel with it's new Orange Shandy, infused with cardamom and white pepper.

So what's driving this growth?

In the U.S., "you've got the whole cocktail and mixology culture coming into play now," says Datamonitor's Tom Vierhile.

Shandies, he notes, have always been more popular in summertime, when beer drinkers are looking for a lighter brew to help chase off the heat. And younger drinkers, he adds, tend to favor a sweeter alcoholic beverage.

But globally, Vierhile says there's another fundamental reason why shandy is growing in popularity: Because shandy is beer mixed with another, usually non-alcoholic drink, it's often half as alcoholic as the same volume of a regular beer.

And less is better, he says, in a world where governments are tightening laws around drinking and driving, reducing the legal limits for how high drivers' blood alcohol content can be before they're breaking the law.

"Depending on the local laws, you may be able to drink a shandy and still be within the legal limit for driving," he notes. "If you're in a place like Germany, with a limit of .05 percent [blood alcohol concentration], which is lower than the U.S.'s at .08 [percent], you could still drink a shandy, legally," and then get behind the wheel.

That's good news for U.S. beer drinkers, considering that the National Transportation Safety Board recently backed a proposal to lower the legal blood-alcohol threshold in the U.S. to match Germany's .05 percent.

Funny enough, its lower alcoholic punch is also why shandy was eagerly embraced by 19th-century England, says beer historian Ron Pattinson.

"People outdoors in the summertime," he says, "wanted a refreshing drink with less alcohol than full-strength beer."

Enlarge image i