Khachapuri is basically a bread filled with bread, cheese and butter. The cheese goes in early, and gets bubbling hot. The egg and butter are added when the khachapuri comes out of the oven and the heat of cheese cooks them. My traveling companions tell me that the khachapuri was the best thing they ate during the entire trip.

As you may have guessed, a story that starts out so optimistically may actually be headed for something else. We did indeed find lots of bakeries. Lots of ovens. Warm and welcoming bakers who invited us in and showed us around. Only they’re not wood-fired, they’re gas-fired. Even the oven that the information center staff told us about, guaranteed to be wood-fired, was gas-fired.

But though they’re not wood-fired, the ovens are still quite interesting. They’re called tendir, and are related to Indian tandoor ovens. A tendir is larger than a tandoor and proportionally shorter, with a much bigger opening at the top. As with a tandoor, the heat source is at the bottom and the bread is stuck to the side.

The first place I found is just off Tavusuplebi Moedani (oddly labeled Freedom Square on city maps but not known by that name to any Georgian we met). It has two windows fronting onto the sidewalk; no door, no seats, just two walk-up windows and a “bakery” sign in the eerily beautiful Georgian script.

The baker puts the dough on a cushion and slaps it against the inner wall. After four or five minutes the bread is speared with a long-handled hook and, if recalcitrant, pried loose with a long-handled spatula. The breads are a foot and a half long, so you can see that the oven’s quite big.

Nino’s hole-in-the-wall bakery was even smaller. We met her on our first day in Tbilisi. She marched up because we had a map out and demanded to know what we were looking for. In fifteen minutes she showed us enough Tbilisi to occupy us for days and then disappeared to study for her finals.

Nino’s bakery, as we came to call it, is literally a two- or three-foot hole in the wall. No glass, no display case, not even a shelf; just a stream of people coming for bread.

Inside the window is the smallest bakery I’ve ever seen. It’s mostly on the basement level so the window, from the baker’s perspective, is way up the wall. It gives his bread an Alice-in-Wonderland feel, as you peer through the little window into his underground realm.

The ovens are large enough for many breads at a time. This baker is practically diving into the oven to fit in as many breads as possible, in preparation for the afternoon rush of people on the way home to dinner.

There’s no diving required for taking the breads out; he has long-handled tools for removing them.

Generally the ovens are kept warm, with a low flame. But the flame can be turned up quite high when needed, such as first thing in the morning. Presumably, at times like this, there is no diving in.

Baku seems to have rather mixed feelings about preseving its more recent past. In 1900, a third of the world’s oil came through Baku and a lot of Baku was built with the money from that boom. Today though, most of it is in poor repair and it’s being torn down at a breakneck pace. Baku today has a new oil boom. It’s the starting point of the trans-Caucuses pipeline, and once again the money is flowing. Almost everything is being built, rebuilt or torn down; the city is full of scaffolds and hammering and dust.

One casualty of all this rush to modernize is the wood oven. It still exists in the countryside and in people’s back yards but it’s not  fashionable enough to survive in the city, except in ethnic or upscale restaurants. Accordingly, directed by the indefatigable Nino, we turned our attention to Sultan, the swanky Turkish restaurant around the corner from our apartment.

Sultan has an entire oven dedicated to bread. The breads are light, tender, and tasty; just right for wrapping around grilled vegetables or scooping up hummus.

But the bread oven is in the back room. The star of the restaurant is the charcoal grill: it’s twenty feet long and runs the length of the granite counter at the front of the restaurant. Aslan presides over the grill like an amiable samurai: focused, active and calm. Everything we had was simply and quickly cooked. If this is any indication of what we’ll find in Istanbul, the only question will be whether we’ll have enough time for everything.

But first… on to Tbilisi!

Happily, it turned out that the trip was more than worth it. Laurent Rouvier’s little socca stand is a small-is-better marvel and his socca is light, tasty and satisfying. M. Rouvier is a happy and warm-hearted cook who obviously enjoys what he’s doing. Judging by the number of people stopping by for socca and a chat, his customers enjoy it too.

Nice is surprisingly warm for December, with blue skies and temperatures in the fifties. No wonder people like to vacation here. But though it’s warm and sunny to my Seattle-based frame of mind, it’s apparently chilly from the Nicoise point of view and a lot of the places I’m seeking are closed. It turns out that socca is not necessarily all that easy to find.

First stop: Theresa, in the open-air flower market. The market is beautiful; here are flavored salts at a booth full of spices. But, tragically, I learn that Theresa has closed up shop for the season.

Second stop: Pipo Socca. Pipo, too, is closed!

Third stop: the open-air market in Vence. I took a lovely bus trip up into the hill town of Vence on Wednesday and learned that yes, the socca guy comes to Vence… on Fridays.

Fourth stop: I inquire at the Nice tourist office. They say they’re not allowed to give recommendations or names, but then they bend the rules and discreetly mark a little street on my map. I wander through a warren of tiny medieaval streets and yes, there’s it is! socca! It’s even one of the places I came here to find: chez Renee. They’re cooking in huge flat pans in a wood oven and people are lined up around the corner. Here’s a pan that’s just come out of the oven; it will feed about six people.

Next stop on the wood-oven trail: Moscow! This may be the most difficult stop, as wood ovens are quite hard to find in Moscow other than in glitzy high-end restaurants. Add to that the deep cold of a Russian winter, and Moscow may be quite a challenge. Nevertheless, after a transit stopover tomorrow in London, onward on the wood-oven trail!