Inside Philly’s New Must-Try Georgian Restaurant
From garlic-laden chicken satsivi to soul-satisfying khinkali dumplings, Megobari masters the art of Georgian comfort food.
Megobari’s dining room / Photography by Gene Smirnov
I love it here.
I live here now.
I’m never coming home.
Five minutes because I could smell the garlic from the kitchen and the dill on the fried potatoes being slowly eaten by the ladies one table over — biting them in half between gusts of furious Russian syllables. Five minutes because the menu here — a single laminated page, front and back, full of Georgian khachapuri and shkmeruli and fresh bread and lamb stew with plums — is a greatest-hits list of one of the great underrepresented comfort cuisines in Philly. Not four minutes or three minutes — too love-at-first-sight for my jaded, cynical heart. But five minutes because that’s all it took for me to remember how much I love Georgian food. How much I’ve missed it. How happy I was to be in a place that knows how to do it right.
Spread at Megobari: Adjarian khachapuri, chicken satsivi, ojakhuri with mushrooms, and nadugi
Megobari is small, neat, still shiny with its newness — sand-colored walls and polished hardwood floors, smooth jazz on the radio, pebbled water glasses, and leatherette clamshell dining chairs like something out of a swinging ‘70s cocktail party. On the walls, shelves of curated knickknacks (a wooden sailing ship, a violin, a clock radio, a tiny portable television) that — in their sparseness, their utter randomness — feel like art, like beloved objects begging to be wondered at. And set over the tiny, boxy counter with its gleaming espresso machine and cut-glass decanters of various colored liquids, a sign with just one word, all caps: VIBES.
And then, the menu. The food, like most Georgian food, is focused primarily on potatoes, dumplings, walnuts, cream, rich stews, and cheese on bread: kharcho with rice, coriander, and knuckles of fatty beef; corn-flour grits thickened with briny Sulguni cheese; pan-fried chicken legs and thighs, seared until the edges crisp, then set to swim in a garlic cream sauce the color of eggshells and so rich it could buy its own boat.
Years ago, I had chicken satsivi for the first time, immediately forgot the name of it, and spent months desperately trying to remember what I’d eaten. It is chicken, served cold in a smooth walnut cream sauce, and, when it sneaks up on you, it can be one of those dishes you remember for the rest of your life. At Megobari, they serve a rougher version, in a sauce thick with crushed walnuts, pinkish, garlicky, studded with ground chicken meatballs with a texture halfway between Vietnamese bo vien and really good falafel.
Khinkali at Megobari
The khinkali here are particularly good — diced meat and herbs, soaked in broth so they eat almost like soup dumplings, all wrapped in a thick dumpling skin that’s gathered and twisted into a little handle at the top for convenience (and for counting to know who has eaten how many) — but the khachapuri will always be the star of Georgian cuisine. The main attraction. The one thing you know about Georgian food even if you think you know nothing at all.
Adjarian khachapuri is essentially a bread bowl filled with lava — a football-shaped loaf with a twisted pigtail at each end, hollowed out and filled with molten cheese, generally accompanied by a single egg yolk that you glork onto the top of the melted cheese and then stir in. And it is fucking delicious. Indulgent. Party food for those emboldened enough (by good company or a hip flask full of Grey Goose) to put something in their mouths that’s roughly the same temperature as the surface of the sun.
An assortment of pkhali
But as good as Adjarian khachapuri is, its sister, the humble, unassuming Imeretian khachapuri, is the secret GOAT of this party. Plain on the surface, sure, but it’s a fresh, thin, round loaf, stuffed to the edge with a layer of impossibly stretchy Sulguni cheese, then baked golden-brown and perfect in a wickedly hot oven so that the base rises just a little and the cheese all melts just a little and the thin top layer of dough crisps just a little. Then you serve it, uncut, to the entire table.
It’s like pizza if pizza were only unbelievably good, soft dough and a briny, pickled cheese and nothing more. It’s like the greatest cheesy breadstick you’ve ever had. And even if Megobari served only this — even if it were just a little strip mall hole-in-the-wall surrounded by Uzbek restaurants and hookah bars and sketchy massage parlors that offered nothing but Imeretian khachapuri day in and day out — I would gladly make the drive into the far Northeast for only that.
I mean, don’t get me wrong. The satsivi, the khinkali, the cheese grits, the plates of herbed potatoes, the smooth jazz and VIBES — I love all of that too. But I’d trade all of that any day for those beautiful khachapuri.
So just imagine how happy I am that I don’t have to. That now, at Megobari, I can have it all.
3 Stars — Come from anywhere in Philly
Rating Key
0 stars: stay away
★: come if you have no other options
★★: come if you’re in the neighborhood
★★★: come from anywhere in Philly
★★★★: come from anywhere in America
Published as “Khachapuri Comfort” in the May 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.
