About Gabriadze Cafe
Rezo Gabriadze is Georgia's most beloved living artist — puppeteer, playwright, sculptor, painter, and the man who built the Rezo Gabriadze Marionette Theatre in Old Tbilisi, a place whose performances reduce grown audiences to tears. He also designed the cafe next door: every painting on the walls, every poster, every sculpture, every curtain, every chair. Opened in 1988, the Gabriadze Cafe is a room that has never been redecorated because there has never been any reason to. It was finished perfectly the first time.
The covered outdoor terrace is where Tbilisi comes in the late afternoon. It faces the Theatre's famous automaton clock — a mechanical tower in which a little figure of an angel strikes a bell on the hour and the hour of your death is measured in the particular quality of the bell's resonance. Across the lane stands the ancient Anchiskhati basilica, the oldest surviving church in Tbilisi, its warm stone turning gold in the evening light. To sit at a table on this terrace with a glass of wine and nowhere to be is one of the finest experiences the city offers.
The food is modern Georgian, putting a new twist on traditional recipes without losing the thread of the original. The menu is not large, but every dish is made with the refined attention the setting demands. Cornbread bagel with fresh sulguni. Dishes cooked in a ketsi — a shallow earthenware pan brought directly to the table from the oven, crackling and content. Seasonal soups. Lobiani. The khinkali here are not the city's best, but in this room, beside this theatre, that is not why you came. You came because of what happens when food and art share the same address for long enough that they become indistinguishable.
For a first date that requires no further explanation of its quality — the setting does the work — this terrace on Shavteli Street is one of Tbilisi's most commanding openings. For a proposal, the intimacy of the interior rooms and the theatricality of the location make the moment inevitable. For solo dining, the terrace at five o'clock with the light failing over the basilica and the automaton angel preparing to ring the bell requires no company at all.