Manic Bookstore Cafe

Some of the best Georgian cuisine I've ever eaten was at Tbilisi restaurant in Warsaw (ul. Pulawska, 24) last April. On Yelp there is a helpful review that uses one of my favorite expressions in Russian (and, I guess, in Polish):  teoretycznie. Theoretically, says Amelia K., the restaurant opens at noon. Restauracja Gruzińska  Tbilisi, Warsaw [photo by Amelia K.] Theoretically they also have everything on the menu. But after our absolutely fantastic evening there in April -- when our friend Babs was visiting from the States -- my husband and I went back again for a romantic lunch. Not. Almost everything we ordered was not available that day, including the amazing spinach balls we had been dreaming about for weeks. Recently I've begun preparing the Russian cuisine course I'm offering in spring semester, and it has me thinking about my experiences in Soviet restaurants and cafes. Of course there weren't many options for dining out when I lived in Moscow in the l...

I am beginning to wish that like many of my fellow Americans I took pictures of my food. It's hard to do a food-related blog post and not have any photographic evidence! It's shocking that I haven't had a chance to get to the blog in almost six weeks -- I guess that's what teaching full-time does to me and my writing hobby. Not that I haven't been sitting at the computer -- but instead of writing blog posts, I've been responding to student posts (23 a week, with personalized graded responses) and papers (only 5 students in my upper level course, so that's utterly manageable) and presentations. Plus writing up a class observation for a colleague, a letter of reference for another, working on a long-overdue piece on World War One in "post-memory" for my Polish volume editor, and otherwise typing typing typing. And thinking that there's no time left to blog. But I did take the time last week to cook. And it was glorious. Much much chopping, b...