Set The Scene
If you live in New York City, you might have noticed Georgian restaurants suddenly popping up all over the place, like mushrooms after a rainstorm. It used to be that if you wanted to eat khachapuri, the baked cheese bread that seems to serve as everyone’s introduction to the cuisine—the pad Thai of Georgian dishes—you had to either get on a subway bound for Brighton Beach in south Brooklyn or hop on a Tbilisi-bound flight.
Not so anymore. There are dozens of Georgian restaurants sprinkled around the city. In the West Village alone there are eight—so much so that when I interviewed Gurami Oniani of year-and-a-half-old Georgian restaurant Laliko earlier this year, he jokingly referred to the West Village as "Little Georgia.”
Enter Askili Orchard. This 114-seat Georgian restaurant was opened by restaurateur Giorgi Papiashvili in Autumn 2025 in the West Village. The exposed brick walls and warm woods of the interior, devised by Georgian designer Nino Mshvelidze, create a rustic-yet-elegent atmosphere while the enormous front windows looking out on bustling Sixth Avenue provide a link between rustic Georgia and urban New York City.
What’s The Food Like?
The menu here is noteworthy in that it deviates from most other Georgian restaurants in the city by somewhat eschewing the cuisine’s “greatest hits”—certainly a sign that a cuisine has found a solid footing in a place when chefs start getting creative with it.
The chef in question is Georgian-born Tengo Eteria who has logged time in the kitchen at Michelin three-star Azurmendi in Spain’s Basque Country. His mission, he told me when he stopped by my table, is to elevate a dish but keep it grounded in its foundation. There’s a method to his madness. “I’m keeping all the elements of Georgian cuisine—the sweet, the sour, the umami, the salty, and the bitter—and replacing heavy ingredients with a lighter variety.” Case in point: in the chakpuli, a traditional hearty lamb stew, Eteria, upped the level of acidic ingredients, relying on wild sour plums that keeps the dish lighter and prevents the diner from feeling overly stuffed (as the traditional version tends to do). The kharcho, a traditional soup, reveals Eteria’s kitchen skills at their most deft. Instead of a soup, he places slices of ultra-tender seared veal in a walnut sauce next to a small block of elarji (the Georgian equivalent of grits) that is topped with smoked salguni cheese. Lurking underneath it all, walnut oil, parsley oil, and tomato paste add a euphoric depth to the flavor strata.
You can still get your kinkhali, the xiao long bao-like soup dumplings (the lamb variety at Askili is exceptional) and your Adjaruli khachapuri, the boat-shaped cheese bread with a raw egg dolloped in the middle, the dish some people annoyingly call a “cheese boat.” But you can also get Eteria’s excellent more experimental khachapuri, a double-crusted baked cheese bread stuffed with spinach, swiss chard, mozzarella, and feta, and then glazed with a parsley pesto. It’s tangy, sour, and creamy all at the same time and may make you forego that “cheese boat” for a while.
Let’s Talk About The Drinks
Papiashvili hired Lisa Granik, one of the few females to hold the designation Master of Wine, to put together the excellent wine list, most of which leans on Georgia, with some nods to Slovenia, New York’s Finger Lakes, northern Italy, and the Czech Republic. Amber (or orange) wines from Georgia make up the largest section on the list. And most of the bottles on the wine list are of the natural variety. In all, about 70 percent of the 40 bottles are offered by the glass.
The cocktail program is exciting and fun, often relying on Georgian ingredients. The Coral Mystique is blended with mezcal, tequila, cherry jam, lime juice, and then layered on top with a liberal splash of red Saperavi wine, Georgia’s most pervasive grape.
Final Thoughts
Askili Orchard is breaking new ground for Georgian cuisine in the United States, elevating it to new heights we’ve not seen outside of a few sleek restaurants in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital city. The traditional cuisine is rustic and hearty, striking a unique balance between Mediterranean-esque in its use of fresh herbs, walnut sauces, pomegranate seeds, and eggplant with that of a comfort food—the regional versions of khachapuri, the meat-and-broth-stuffed dumplings called kinkhali, and the lamb stews.
But talented chef Tengo Eteria is taking some creative liberties with the cuisine, while also making it lighter, but still managing to keep the culinary foundations of Georgian cuisine so that it’s still recognizable and familiar but slightly askew. And, more importantly, very delicious.
Fast Facts
Location: The West Village
Cuisine: Georgian
Pricing: $$
Takes Reservations: Yes, OpenTable and Resy
Our Favorite Dishes on the Menu: swiss chard and spinach khachapuri, lamb and tarragon kinkhali, veal kharcho, aubergine roulette, chakpuli.
Hours: Monday - Thursday, 12:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m.; Friday, 12:00 p.m. - 11:00 p.m.; Saturday, 11:00 a.m. - 11:00 p.m.; Sunday, 11:00 a.m. - 10:00 p.m.
New York City, New York, United States
