Gruzienobody comes to Prague for Georgian food, and that's their loss.

the Georgians have been making wine in clay pots buried in the ground for 8,000 years, so they’re not taking notes from anyone. you sit in a dark room, a guy brings you a bottle named after a prince, and a boat of molten cheese with butter on top gets set down in front of you. no salad, no restraint, no apologies. this is food for people who plan on living a little.

start with the boat. adjaruli khachapuri comes from Adjara, down on Georgia’s Black Sea coast around Batumi: dough rolled up at the edges into a hull, filled with cheese, baked, then finished at the table with butter (and, done the classic way, a raw egg yolk) stirred through until the whole thing turns into a sauce. you tear the crust off the sides and dredge. there’s no polite way to do it and nobody’s asking you to.

the cheese doing the heavy lifting all night is sulguni, from Samegrelo in western Georgia. it’s a stretched-curd cheese, pulled in hot water like mozzarella and then left in brine, so it comes out salty, a little sour and elastic, and Georgia protects the name. fry it and it goes golden outside and stringy inside. bake it in a ketsi, the little clay dishes they’ve cooked in out west forever, and you get what landed in front of us: meat drowned in sulguni, still bubbling at the edges.

which is why you need the tonis puri. it’s baked slapped against the inside walls of a tone, a deep round clay oven that’s a cousin of the tandoor, and Georgians eat it every single day. it exists to mop up the evidence. use it.

the khachapuri with meat, the blinčik under tetri sauce and pomegranate seeds, the kebabi buried in peppers and onion: all solid, all doing their job.

and the wine. Prince Alexander Chavchavadze ran the Tsinandali estate in Kakheti in the 1800s, brought in European winemakers, and his cellar still holds what’s called Georgia’s oldest bottled wine, from 1841. the clay pots in the ground made UNESCO’s heritage list in 2013. the Georgians did not need the endorsement.