Little Georgia, 14 Barnsbury Road, London N1 OHB

Little Georgia, 14 Barnsbury Road, London N1 OHB

25/08/2013

www.littlegeorgia.co.uk

She said: He loves Georgian food so we hit Little Georgia after a show at Saddlers Wells in Angel. What a pleasant surprise. Given the basic website and the ‘conversation by delayed satellite’ way in which I made the reservation with a sweet dear on the phone, I was expecting a small, simple family kitchen. However, Little Georgia is housed in a beautiful converted corner pub with Georgian newsprint wallpaper, posters and other paraphernalia adorning the inside. The menu contained all the classics and the portions were big which meant we reverted to our over-ordering-type. We shared a delicious beetroot salad (which he was so impressed by he subsequently has made it at home); a giant bowl of borscht; badrijnis salad which contained succulent aubergine and my favourite – kotnis lobio, a warming bean stew. We also had the traditional Georgian cheese bread ‘khachapuri’ which was actually my least favourite as the bread was thick and heavy and the cheese slightly sour (maybe that’s how it’s meant to be) but overall this was a spectacular meal at good value. The total bill came to just over £30 and we left feeling heavy and happy.

He said: Little Georgia deserves to be packed to the rafters every night. But I don’t know how it would cope if it was: what’s great about this place is that it tastes just like home-cooked food & I’m sure that if you went into the kitchen there would be no-one else but a slightly plump Mum with a paisley shawl on her head and a mouth half-filled with gold teeth, working though a cloud of order slips. We went on a Sunday night, with room for dozens more, and waited god knows how long for our food. But it was worth every second. Nearly every dish we tried was the best version of that dish we’d had in any of London’s surprisingly many Georgian restaurants. The borshcht was killer, the aubergine caponata-type thing was killer, the beetroot salad was so good that the second I went home I scribbled the ingredients on the shopping list so that I could make it myself in case of emergency. Just the lobio was a bit of a let-down. If you haven’t had it before Georgian food is similar to middle eastern food with echoes of Iranian; but it is also the very best, most evolved version of that tradition. It’s all familiar, but indescribably and so satisfyingly different. Lots of hidden walnut, pomegranate etc. So, so good. When you mention Georgian food the dish that everybody bangs-on about is kacha puri (flat bread with cheese baked-in), which is great comfort food if you’ve just escaped from months of captivity in some Chechen hell-hole, but it’s kinda ‘meh’ compared to everything else. Here it was really very good: the bread fluffy, and the cheese not fatty. But next time I will have lobiani (the same thing except with a heady kidney-bean mash instead of cheese). Please let it be soon!