Mtskheta Restaurant
Georgian restaurant · Sheepshead Bay ·
Authentic Georgian fare like khachapuri and khinkali
Authentic Georgian fare like khachapuri and khinkali
"Bordering Bath Beach, Mtskheta Café pumps out Georgian classics in a green-hued, faux-brick dining room, complete with paper napkins, a campy jungle mural and TV looping foreign music videos. While the décor may be lacking, the service and food excel, setting this impossible-to-pronounce restaurant apart from the nearby bodegas and elevated subway tracks.Whether or not you can deduce what’s on the Cyrillic-scripted menu, friendly servers stand by, directing guests to native dishes like badrijani, an almost overwhelming helping of eggplant stuffed with walnut purée. But oh that fried khinkali, a homestyle dish composed of browned dumplings filled with broth and a beef meatball. Once dipped into sour cream, it's worth every second of the 30-minute wait." - Michelin Inspector
"Bordering Bath Beach, Mtskheta Café pumps out Georgian classics in a green-hued, faux-brick dining room, complete with paper napkins, a campy jungle mural and TV looping foreign music videos. While the décor may be lacking, the service and food excel, setting this impossible-to-pronounce restaurant apart from the nearby bodegas and elevated subway tracks. Whether or not you can deduce what’s on the Cyrillic-scripted menu, friendly servers stand by, directing guests to native dishes like badrijani, an almost overwhelming helping of eggplant stuffed with walnut purée. But oh that fried khinkali, a homestyle dish composed of browned dumplings filled with broth and a beef meatball. Once dipped into sour cream, it's worth every second of the 30-minute wait." - Michelin Inspector
"Gravesend’s Mtskheta Cafe, right at the corner of 86th Street near Stillwell Avenue on the way to Coney Island, is named after a town in Georgia that dates to the Bronze Age. The interior resembles a dukani, a country tavern and a very nice place to spend an afternoon or evening. The khinkali are particularly good and filled with juice; the kharcho soup teeming with meat, rice, and vegetables; the round cornbread machadi made with white cornmeal; and the khachapuri stuffed with imeruli cheese that oozes out the moment it’s cut in wedges and served." - Robert Sietsema
"For real cheeseheads the imeruli khachapuri at Mtskheta Cafe is the prize: its filling of pure imeruli cheese doesn’t just ooze but thickly flows, and the optional walnut sauce found elsewhere on the menu makes a wonderful dip." - Robert Sietsema
"For the last decade, one of those places for me has been Mtskheta Cafe in Gravesend, Brooklyn, named after an ancient town and housed in an intimate space made to look like a partly finished basement with a stone fireplace whose mantle is lined with bottles of Georgian wine. The restaurant, run by two Georgian-born chefs, Nana Naghradze and Kate Wheeler (who is also a part owner), serves the sort of cold composed salads dressed with walnut sauce, garlicky chicken tabaka, herb-laced stews, and especially khachapuri that helped spark interest in Georgian food. Their khachapuri is eggless but brilliant: Imeruli cheese pressed between two thin layers of dough, cut into quarters so the salty cheese oozes; I advise springing for an $8 bowl of classic walnut sauce, bazhe. Khinkali (six for $10) are large, steamed Georgian dumplings filled with ground meat; mchadi ($4) are hot white masa cakes; the chicken tabaka is tender and crisp-skinned though a little low on garlic. Charcoal kebabs are satisfying — order the lamb ($8) for the smokiest, fattiest option — and the young potato with garlic ($10), a giant plate of small red potatoes boiled skin-on, deep-fried, and strewn with garlic and parsley, is revelatory for garlic lovers. Supposedly famous for its Napoleon pastry (which I haven’t tried because I’m always too full), the place also offers a nice, not-too-sweet bottle of Georgian wine for $22; overall it’s very price-friendly and blessedly quiet." - Robert Sietsema
