What mtsvadi actually is
Mtsvadi is Georgian barbecue, and that translation does it no favours. Pieces of pork — usually neck or shoulder, cut to about the size of a small fist — are pushed onto a flat metal skewer, salted, and held over the embers of burnt-down grapevine wood until the outside is dark and the fat has rendered through the middle. In the versions worth travelling for there is no marinade, no basting sauce, no spice rub. Salt, meat, fire and the particular smoke of old vine. That is the whole dish, and it is one of the few Georgian things that is genuinely better at a roadside stand than in a dining room.
The wood is not incidental. Vineyards in Kakheti are pruned every winter, and the cuttings — knotted, dense, dry by summer — are exactly the fuel mtsvadi wants. They catch fast, burn hot, and fall to a bed of embers with a smell that is faintly sweet rather than resinous. The meat takes that on in a way charcoal briquettes do not. Georgians will tell you this with the conviction of people who have compared, and having eaten both within an hour of each other in the same village, we think they are right.
It arrives on the skewer, or slid off it onto bread, with raw onion rings scattered over the top — often the onion has been worked with salt and a little sour plum sauce first. There will be tkemali on the table, the sharp green or red plum sauce that cuts pork fat better than anything else in the region. Somewhere near the end, if it is autumn, someone squeezes a pomegranate over the plate. The juice runs into the meat juices and the dish changes character entirely.
Two honest things before you order. Restaurant mtsvadi cooked over a gas grill is a different and lesser dish: perfectly pleasant meat, but the flavour you came for lives in the vine embers and there is no substitute for it. And this is well-done meat by definition. Nobody here serves pork pink, asking for it will get you a polite refusal or a nervous cook, and the tenderness comes from the fat rather than from the rareness.
The wood, and why it matters
Every vineyard in Kakheti is pruned in winter and every pruning leaves a heap of knotted vine cuttings behind. They dry through spring, and by summer they are the best fire in the country: quick to catch, hot, and quick to fall to embers. Nobody buys this wood. It is a by-product of making wine, which is exactly why mtsvadi and Kakheti belong to each other.
What a good fire is not, at the moment the meat goes on, is flames. The wood is burnt right down before a skewer comes near it, and the cooking happens over glowing coals with the man at the grill fanning them with a piece of cardboard. If there is fire under the meat, you have arrived at the wrong stage, or the wrong stand.
How it is cooked
The cut is fatty by choice. Pork neck is the standard, shoulder the common alternative, and the fat is not trimmed off because the fat is what keeps the meat from drying over a hot bed of coals. The pieces are large — five or six to a skewer — and they are salted, sometimes an hour ahead, often only as they go on. Nothing else. Yoghurt, vinegar and onion marinades belong to shashlik, and Georgians are quietly firm about the difference.
The skewers are flat steel rather than round, so the meat turns when the skewer turns instead of spinning loose. They go across a narrow metal trough, close over the coals, and the cook turns them constantly for half an hour, moving them off when the dripping fat threatens to flare. Flatbread often sits underneath at the end, catching the fat, and that bread is frequently the best thing on the table.
The finish is quick and unceremonious. The meat is slid off onto a plate or onto the bread, salted once more, buried under raw onion, and carried out. In autumn a pomegranate is halved and squeezed over it. Nobody rests the meat, nobody sauces it at the grill, and nothing arrives arranged.
What comes with it
The accompaniments are fixed and few, and each of them is doing a job on the fat. Refusing the onion because it is raw is the most common visitor mistake at a mtsvadi table, and it is the one that changes the dish most.
Where it is done right
The classic setting is a gravel pull-in on a Kakheti road with a metal trough, a plastic table and smoke you can see from a hundred metres away. There is rarely a sign worth reading. You point at the meat, it is weighed in front of you, and someone brings bread while it cooks.
The other classic setting is not for sale at all. At rtveli, in late September and October, families grill mtsvadi in the yard for whoever has helped with the grapes, and if you are staying in a village guesthouse during harvest there is a fair chance you will be handed a plate. That is the best version of this dish and no amount of money buys it.
When to eat it
Mtsvadi is cooked all year, and unlike most Georgian food it does not have a strict season. What it has is a peak, and the peak is the grape harvest: the yards are full, the pomegranates are ripe, the new wine is being drawn and there is more vine wood than anyone knows what to do with.
Within the day it is a late lunch rather than a dinner, at least at the roadside. Stands fire up towards midday and are often out of the good meat by early evening, and the fire is allowed to die when the meat is gone.
What it costs
Roadside mtsvadi is usually priced by weight rather than by portion, which confuses visitors used to menus. A kilo of cooked pork feeds three people who have not eaten since breakfast, and two who have. Everything below is a rough range and rounded up; village prices sit at the bottom of it and Tbilisi at the top.
At the table
A plate of mtsvadi at a stand is just lunch, but the same plate at a family table is the beginning of a supra, and the rules change with it. None of them are strict against foreigners, and all of them are noticed and appreciated.
The city version, and the rest of the country
In Tbilisi mtsvadi is on almost every menu and is almost never the same thing. Kitchens in the old town cook it indoors, often over charcoal and sometimes over gas, and while the meat can be good the smoke is missing and the price is double. If you have a single evening in the city and want the dish, ask directly whether the grill burns wood; if the answer takes a while to arrive, order khinkali and eat mtsvadi in Kakheti later in the trip.
Outside Kakheti the dish shifts with what the region has. In the mountains it may be lamb or veal, cooked over beech rather than vine, and just as good in its own way. Along the Georgian Military Road, roadside grills at the passes cook for drivers all summer, which makes them a reasonable stop but not the version to judge the dish by. Pork remains the default almost everywhere, so if you do not eat it, say so before ordering rather than after.
There is also fasting to reckon with. During the long Orthodox fasts, particularly the weeks before Easter, many village households will not cook pork at all, and some village restaurants quietly take it off. It is never a problem to find food, only occasionally a problem to find this food, and one phone call to a guesthouse the day before solves it.
The five mistakes
We have made four of these ourselves, and the first is the only one that ruins the dish.
The questions that always come
These six reach us every autumn, and none needs a long answer.