Dinner at Kachapuri

Yellow
A trip to the edge of Europe means cheese.
 Pro Delicious dishes.
 Con Location seems to push the prices up.

Pay
**
**Per Person On our visit, two beers, one main course €18-€20. Adding wine and/or desserts would send this over €25. Gratis; a sausage roll!

Find
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Access Step free entry.


In Short
Hopes. And now for something completely different.
Reality. It's...Gorgeous Georgia.
First Impressions.  I came along. I wrote a review of you. And all the things that you do. And it was called Yellow.
USP? Are there any other Georgian restaurants in Madrid?
The offer in three words. Best in Winter.
Service! One amiable, efficient chap.
Friend friendly? Easily pleased a hungry vegetarian.
Rating for dating. Could be cosier, but probable a goer.
Tip? Only just.
Change one thing? Desserts at €7 a go. Really?
Revisitability. Good. Numerous dishes to try, and others to retry.

Compare & Contrast
There's no-one else serving this kind of thing in Madrid - as far as we know!

In Pictures
On Google Images

The hm Yummometer
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What's the story?
Honestly happy, we had an enjoyable selection of well-cooked food at Kachapuri.

We'd been looking forward to this for a while. Sauntering about Chueca, as one does, I'd been astounded to find a Georgian restaurant, just a minute from Gran Via.

Not our first try at this cuisine, we had an idea what to go for, so three of us chose three dishes. The classic kachapuri, a spinach filled one and chicken brochette. Abandoning the usual starter and main thing, we had these en famille:
Kachapuri
Adjaruli kachapuri  is pretty much the Georgian national dish. That distinctive pointy ended bread stuffed with salty cheese and topped with an egg. Just when you think your cardiovascular system has taken a deep breath and got the measure of it, the instruction comes to add two or three knobs of butter and mix the thing like a demon. At least I'm going to feel like a virtuous orangutan eating nothing but fruit for the next month. But look, the Adjaruli is delicious. Salty. Fatty. Excellent, yeasty crunchy bread to scoop up chunks of filling. It feels right and tastes excellent, although I'm really not looking forward to buying the leotard for the zumba classes. Talk about a deal with the devil.

And the Spinach Kachapuri? Coming in like a thin, crunchy, freshly baked empanada, it's excellent too. Eight slices are demolished by all three of us. Will the green, popeye-friendly superfood let me off the artery-hardening dis-ahhhh-ster I'm working toward tonight? I know. Not a snowball's. I'd better be off to Amazon to search for gymballs.

That last sentence is, of course, a feed line. The day I went near one would be my blackest Friday.

Our third dish, Mtsvadi is offered as chicken, cow or pig versions. We went chicken thinking it seemed a better flavour fit with a lemon marinade. Pork and lemon might sound intriguing, but at the price, experimenting is not top of the agenda. A rapidly barbecued chicken breast which could have used 30 seconds more, perhaps, had been taken off its skewer, and came with an excellent acidic spicy sauce. Just when you thought your arteries might think about forgiving you, there's a baked potato topped with more melted cheese on the side.

So, the main food events are winners, we are very impressed and would readily come back for more and to try more stuff. We didn't go for desserts or wine. They're more expensive than we'd expect. Georgian wines may well be hard to come by, putting them in the €30 bracket. But ribeira and rioja could be priced more kindly than they are. Desserts were priced €7, and a trio of the usual suspects doesn't push my curiousity button. And carrot cake as a dessert? Not sure, there. We suspect the fact this isn't the best value ever is down to location. It does take some shine off, mind.

Service, early on a Friday night, was fine, with helpful, bilingual advice and good radar getting me another beer without having to get the semaphore flags out. Decor is overwhelmingly that signature yellow. It's not a space you'd call cosy or intimate though. Boxlike, it's rather echoey. A (not especially noisy) group were clearly amplified by the corner they'd been placed in, so some sound baffling decor wouldn't hurt. And on a cold draughty night, with customers wandering out to smoke far too often (yes, more than never), you'd not want to end up at the table by the door.

So there are caveats, but those main courses demand trying. Pizza got there first, but Georgian food might otherwise have taken over the world. Go and find out why.