Review: Little Georgia Gives Locals a Taste of the Country’s Big Flavors

If you love Georgian food—which is to say, the food from the former Soviet republic and not the Southern state—or have not yet had reason to love it, head to Little Georgia, which, as far as we know, is the only Georgian restaurant in the Baltimore area.

Open since 2021 in Reisterstown, the walls are hung with Georgian art, there’s a huge wine room, an adjacent bar stocked with Georgian wine and beer, and a pair of mannequins dressed in traditional costume. If you feel like you’ve stumbled into a folk museum, that’s probably by design. You are here to better understand and celebrate the country, though you’ll mostly be doing so by eating as much as possible.

Start with the khachapuri, the Georgian national dish, which comes in many variations but is best experienced as a boat-shaped bread filled with farmer’s cheese and topped with a runny egg. Little Georgia’s rendition is blissful, the bubbly cheese surrounding a sunny yolk atop flavorful bread hot from the oven.

If you wander into the bar area, you can peek into the kitchen, where you’ll likely see a woman shaping the dough—should you wonder at your dish’s excellent provenance. Another regional specialty not to be missed is the khinkali, sturdy dumplings that likely owe their ancestry to Chinese traders and their soup dumplings. These are far thicker, filled with meat, cheese, or mushrooms, and with hefty knobs of dough at the top which aren’t meant to be eaten so much as used as handles.

What else to order depends on how many people are at your table, as you’ll want a good amount of the smaller dishes to share. The “assorted salad” is a collection of walnut-based spreads in various colors—green for spinach, purple for beets, orange for beans. Walnuts also form the sauce for a must-try dish of roasted eggplant and pomegranates. Other dishes to order are the tolma, meat-filled cabbage dumplings in savory tomatoey sauce; and the chakhokhbili, a deeply flavorful stew of chicken, peppers, and tomatoes.

All of this is best accompanied with a glass of the plum kompot, a gorgeous magenta drink with small plums like ice cubes, a glass of Georgian beer, or a bottle from the wine room.

“There are 450 grape varietals in Georgia. It’s the oldest wine in the world,” says co-owner Giorgi Baliashvili, who came to the U.S. from Tbilisi in 2010 and is a former Postal Service worker who long dreamed of opening a Georgian restaurant. Lined up on the bar are boxes of pastries—cakes, baklava, the Georgian candy called churchkhela—all made in-house.

The 60-seat restaurant gets crowded on weekends and at night; if you’re there during the day, you may find your server in the kitchen shaping breads rather than roaming the floor. No worries: You’ll also find a call button on the table, like the ones found in Korean BBQ restaurants.

Be patient, drink some more wine, order another khachapuri, and know that you’ll be coming back.

LITTLE GEORGIA: 2 Hanover Pike, Reisterstown, 410-441-3377. HOURS: Sun., Tues.-Thurs., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Fri., Sat., 11 a.m.-10 p.m. PRICES: Appetizers: $7.99- 16.99; mains: $10.99-24.99; desserts: $2.49-9.99.