It starts, of course, with a little encouragement. A shot of something dark. A swoosh of something frothy. Then on to a wall and a woosh of tongue-tickling spice. Just enough heat to let the senses know we mean business. And then a stir! And a knead and a flop, and then a rest... But wait! There's more. New wares are presented and brought into action. Chop! Stir! Pour! Round and around! Until... And just in time! Out of the furnace comes... Bread baked, coffee finishes, meals

It happened one September afternoon all the way back in 2015... The left bank of the Dnipro River in Kyiv, Ukraine The Master, Denis, manning the grill. Two American expats standing in awe of this eastern steppe meat magic show about to happen. "It's simple, buddy," Denis says. "Just meat over fire." But then you take a bite. Tender juicy cubes of meat nestled perfectly between chunks of onion and mushroom. Perfect, melt-in-your-mouth, the flavor, Mmmm...putting any other g

Cappuccino. Cappuccino. Cappuccino. Frothy milk poking out of pitch black espresso, just like the bald head of a Capuchin monk which is where the drink gets its name. Cappuccino. An espresso is an out-the-door, business, frank talk, on your way coffee. But a cappuccino, in the words of one elderly barista I remember, should feel like “a hug from your mother.” I have watched many hands make many cappuccinos. I have had cappuccinos made by cappuccino masters who would get tears

Georgia, the delightful gem of the Caucasus, is home to what I consider the most mouthwatering of all world cuisines...and I have sampled a few so I know what I'm talking about. Meats, cheeses, and incredible baked goods, this food combines the best of hearty, comfort food extraordinaire Slavic fare with the flavor-rich subtlety of Greece and the Mediterranean. Quite definitely the best of two incredible food worlds. The national food of Georgia is Khachapuri, the blanket te

While borscht always gets the limelight in Eastern European soup circles and at hearty village dinner dates, there is another soup that is waiting for you to spot it. During my time in Kyiv, I found myself falling for a particular savory Ukrainian soup concoction named... Solyanka! For me, this is Slavic soup at it's grandest. It warms you straight to the bone when you've just come in from a Siberian winter and nourishes you for the next step out into the cold and dark. I hav

It was late in the year 2016, high in the Caucasus Mountains on the Eastern frontier of Europe, teetering between Christian Europe to the West, and Islamic Central Asia to the East. This is the ancient land of Colchis where Jason and his Argonauts came in search of the Golden Fleece. This land goes by many names. It's current native citizens call it Sakartvelo, meaning "land of the Kartvelians". Slavic language speakers of Eastern Europe call it Gruzia. It's Muslim neighbors

The room was tight and didn’t exactly make sense as a room. Everything seemed to have been made to fit somewhere it couldn’t, or wouldn’t, or shouldn’t. A decidedly straight row of stairs somehow swayed outwards to accommodate the curve where a plasterer of a bygone era had made the wall suddenly bulge, belly-like, just a bit too far out into the room, and a wall that started out nice and flat and ordinary had somehow become cavernous and unreliable as it continued on into th