It was with some trepidation that I went to Mirázs, the only restaurant in Budapest that bills itself as being Georgian. I had recently visited Georgia, and didn’t want my culinary memories of the trip to be spoiled. On the other hand, the most important Georgian dish is impossible to forget, once you figure out how to eat it.
Most cuisine has a dish by which it can be judged: Hungarians have gulyas, Georgians have khinkali, a meat-filled dumpling roughly the size of a grenade. The way to eat a khinkali, as I was shown in Tbilisi, is to first puncture the dough with a fork or knife, lift it to your mouth with your fingers (see video), then tip it back like a wine skin and suck the juice out, before biting into it – leaving the knotty doe top on the plate. There should be a minimum of five per person at a meal, the platter of dumplings resembling a stack of sandbags, and each khinkali should be accompanied by a shot of vodka. “Beer khinkali, problem,” my Georgian host explained, “vodka khinkali, no problem“. It’s a meal after which I defy anybody to do anything but raise the white flag and find a quiet place to sleep it off.
Mirázs uses the alternate spelling hinkáli on the menu (the clumsy English translation reads “paste filled with lamb”), and they are offered as an appetizer at Ft 300 (€1.20) a pop rather than a staple of the main meal, as they were in Georgia. On the table, these khinkali looked a little deflated, like a soufflé that had fallen while cooking. Once outside of its native land, the culinary munition that so oppressed me in Georgia seemed to have lost some of its threat. These were kinder, gentler khinkali, and easily eaten in a few bites. Mine was flavorful, the broth was manageable and the lamb tender, but this transplanted version was somehow disappointing – I’d expected a bit more of a fight.
Of course, there was a good deal of other food on the table (above) aside from the khinkali, much of it excellent, including eggplant stuffed with a walnut/garlic paste, topped with pomegranate seeds; skermuli, a tasty though “awkwardly butchered” chicken cooked in a garlic milk sauce; and suluguni, a homemade Georgian cheese. Other dishes were less exceptional, like pan-cooked trout and chicken. And the ambiance of the restaurant, which was empty (below) except for our party, left more than a little to be desired.
All that said, beggars can’t be choosers, and those interested in eating Georgian don’t really have any other choices in Budapest. And at least they have khinkali at Mirázs which suck more or less like the original.
