There will be a HO dining group dinner at Chveni Cafe, a Georgian restaurant in Bensonhurst Brooklyn on Friday June 2 at 6:15 pm. Delicious and different food from the ex-Soviet republic, including khachapuri, pork sausages, chicken and beef dishes, eggplant and other veg preparations with delicious walnut sauce, cheese filled cornbreads and more. Here is a blog post from HO member Ziggy about a recent meal. https://eatingwithziggy.com/tag/chveni-cafe-brooklyn/
We currently have one extra seat and could most likely expand the reservation to include others. Please respond to this post if interested in joining us.
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Nice! I cant think of a more proper way to finally meet you Jen, but I will be munching on eel stew in Evora at the time. I could have just said Portugal, but this sounds more exciting. And I’m very excited about this meal even though I wont be there. Enjoy!
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You too!!
Another time, I hope.
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Field trip to Chveni Cafe! We settled into a table up front (after doing some rearranging of the furniture to provide everyone with a decent seat) that gave us a great view of last night’s thunderstorm. The place seem to have one FOH employee, so it was fortunate that there weren’t too many other customers. We started with the Georgian salad with walnuts, a good way to offset all the bread and cheese to come, but VERY salty. Followed by Khachapuri “Chveneburi,” a sort of cheese and scallion quesadilla. (I don’t know what the scare quotes mean, but that’s how the dish appears on the restaurant’s menu.) This was very nice.
And a phkhali trio - spinach spread, beet spread, and eggplant rolled around walnut paste. I was very fond of all three, although we didn’t get anything to spread the spreads on 'til much later, by which time they were, sadly, gone.
Next up was some sausages, served with a mysterious red sauce that was either spicy or not, depending on who you asked. And my raison d’etre, Khachapuri Adjaruli. Fresh bread baked with cheese, butter and an egg. This is a dish that gets ugly faster than a plate of nachos at a bachelorette party, but here it is in its beautiful, untouched state:
Then there was beef, and chicken with what struck me as an alarming amount of garlic. Delicious corn cakes with yet more cheese.
Decent cucumber pickles, and crazy good spicy pickled cabbage that may actually glow in the dark.
And a well-cooked but not too thrilling oven-roasted trout.
All in all, a satisfying meal, and I should be hungry again in a few days, a week, tops. And great to see everyone (and to meet @RSchwim), as usual!
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I’ve made those eggplant / walnut sauce rollups for a party once. They are a massive PITA to make, but delish. They were gone in under a minute 
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I do like a project. 
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I could slather that walnut sauce on almost anything, TBH. Frying the eggplant slices enough so they could be rolled up, but not too much that they got too crispy was part of the PITA process. The sauce was probably the easiest part.
And you could just F the rolling up part and just fry eggplant any ole way you like and have the sauce on the side. Not as pretty, but the flavor is where it’s at for me.
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I’ve been to several of the other Georgian restaurants in Brooklyn. This was the best meal of all. The above pics are great & hopefully the other picture takers will post their shots of the chicken in (lots of) garlic, the great sausages, the beef stew and even the other order of just the eggplant roll ups (4 pieces) which enabled the 6 of us to get one piece each. With good tip, $50pp was a serious bargain (+byob, but including the ridiculously low $5 corkage fee they charged even though we brought several bottles). Although I wouldn’t mind returning to try other dishes, I’d also go back for the exact same meal.
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sorry to have missed it!
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I hate to say it here on HO but this seems like a typical Chowhound mecca, great food but teetering on the brink of ruin. Friday night and just a few customers, so GO. But we had a fine meal overall.
The eggplant was divine with its exotically spiced walnut paste filling (definitively no cheese though it was creamy) I thought the phkali ( think spinach and beet) were good but not the best ever for me. Eggplant looks like it was perhaps grilled not fried? Picking the right eggplant and slicing it thin enough would be the challenge for me.
In addition to the kachapuri, the cornbreads, both cheese filled and not were delectable, and the salad was very good - Maybe as a salt freak I did not find it too salty - I think they gave us enough of the deliciousl walnut salad dressing to cover a few more greens which might have diluted the salt a little?
After we were all starting to get full the main courses started coming, the lobio (beans, really light and nicely spiced), the kupati (a loose and again very nicely spiced sausage), 3 large pieces
The Ostri, a stew of tender beef in a well spiced and herbed tomatoey sauce, which I am dying to figure out and would defiinitely order again, picture of a 2/3 eaten dish is all I got
the quite good but plainly cooked trout, and finally the chicken shkmeruli - the underlying chicken was expertly cooked but it was slathered in what was too much garlic for me - and I felt like it came out of a jar. They have a lot of grilled items, probably worth a try.
I mean, really,
So glad everyone was able to get together on this trip to 18th Avenue! Maybe Oda house sometime.
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Or Chama Mama!
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the cheese filled cornbread is called chvishtari and is particularly nice.
I am not sure what the slightly spicy red sauce was with the sausages - I think a tomato sauce, the plum sauce (we did not have) is very different.
