I distinctly remember the first time I had sushi: September 11, 1998. I was a college freshman, newly arrived on campus after a three-night hiking trip that the university had organized as an orientation activity. Since the dining halls weren’t open yet, the trip leader walked us into town, to a restaurant called Ichiban. When we got there, I ordered last: a California roll, like everyone else. I was nervous about eating it, but I was hungry, having spent half a week subsisting on handfuls of gorp. The roll was great. Over the next year, I went to Ichiban whenever I had the chance. Later, I switched to Sakura Express, a nearby competitor. It had a salad bar that came free with your meal, which turned me into a fan of daikon radishes.

Many people my age have a similar memory. If you grew up in America during the years in which edamame became a snack food for toddlers, my story probably sounds a little dubious. You might be thinking, Did she really not try sushi until she was eighteen (and did she just call a California roll “sushi”)? Maybe she grew up in a weird family? That’s always been my feeling toward the initiation narratives of previous generations. The decades seem off, the foods impossible. The dish my mother didn’t try until college was pizza.

Novelty is America’s tradition. In the culinary realm, this manifests as an aggressive metabolism for other nations’ foods. In January of 1968, a weekly restaurant column by Craig Claiborne, the food critic for the Times, featured “international style” restaurants. Claiborne deemed a Spanish place called El Rincon de España “a genuine find,” despite noting that the chef could be overly generous with the “fresh garlic.” Furthermore, he warned, “the restaurant doesn’t even own a peppermill.” Of Shoei, then the only Japanese restaurant in Greenwich Village, he wrote, “One of the nicest assets is a pretty young Japanese woman in kimono and obi who looks and talks like one of those young women in those television commercials for flights to the Orient.”

Eventually, tapas and tempura become widely available; one no longer has to forgo a pepper mill. The April, 1977, issue of Esquire contained a three-page guide to Japanese food, entitled “Wake Up, Little Su-u-shi, Wake Up!” By that point, according to the magazine, there were almost as many Japanese restaurants in America as there were transistor radios. A kind of accelerated connoisseurship ensues. Americans of all backgrounds will eat a spicy tuna roll from the supermarket, but not without chopsticks, which we rub together, because we are lovers of sushi. It’s the thing we crave most when we’re pregnant. Before long, our stomachs start to rumble for the next big thing.

Right now, that is Georgian food. The hospitality-trend forecaster af&co. recently named it “Cuisine of the Year.” The “Dish of the Year,” the company says, is khachapuri, a term that refers to any number of Georgian cheese-filled breads. (The 2018 winners were Israeli food and rotisserie chicken.) As the trend report noted, khachapuri is photogenic. The dish has been tagged thirty-five thousand times on Instagram, where the version from the Adjara region—an oval slab topped with cheese and a runny egg—is a particular favorite. The yolk, exuding anthropomorphic cuteness, looks like the center of a winking eye. According to the Los Angeles Times, you can get khachapuri in Hollywood, at Tony Khachapüri, which just opened inside a Vietnamese restaurant called Banh Oui. (The family of one of the owners happens to come from Armenia, which borders Georgia to the south.) It is prepared, untraditionally, with garlic sauce. The crust comes dusted with everything-bagel seasoning.

There is so much to love in Georgian food: lobiani, a bean-filled flatbread; khinkali, soup dumplings shaped like E.T.’s head; nadugi, a one-hand sandwich in which salty cheese serves as both wrapper (the skin) and filling (the curds). As Darra Goldstein explains, in “The Georgian Feast,” one of Georgian food’s hallmarks is its use of walnuts, whose richness is often set off with a souring agent, like vinegar or yogurt. Cilantro is the most common herb in Georgian cooking, but tarragon is the most talismanic, flavoring everything from stews to a carbonated drink that you can order at restaurants, like a Coke. Blue fenugreek is used frequently, as are dried and crushed marigold petals, but, if Georgian food has a presiding color, it’s green. Many of the most tantalizing parts of its repertoire derive from vegetables and fruits. I’m counting the days until I can try making chrianteli, a cold soup. Goldstein’s recipe brings to mind a William Carlos Williams poem: Pit and stem two pounds of cherries. Pass through a food mill. Mix the puréed fruit with one-eighth teaspoon salt, half a pressed garlic clove, and three minced sprigs of cilantro and dill. Chill. Garnish with minced scallion.

Then, there’s Georgian wine. A couple of years ago, archeologists working at sites south of Tbilisi unearthed shards of pottery that were coated in oenological residue from 6000 B.C. This means that Georgia, probably the world’s oldest winemaking culture, has completed around eight thousand vintages. Almost every family makes wine. In the traditional method, grapes are aged with their skins in earthenware vessels called kvevri, which are buried underground. Many are left to ferment without much intervention. Georgia was making natural wines, using more than five hundred native grape varietals, before natural wine was a movement. White kvevri wines are especially distinctive. Their color is often closer to deep peach or amber, and they tend to have a highly tannic, brawny taste. If rosé is essentially red wine that’s made like white wine, the so-called orange wines at which Georgia excels can be thought of as whites that are made like reds. In 2017, Georgian exports of wine to America increased by fifty-four per cent from the previous year.

The Danish chef René Redzepi has described Georgia as home to “one of the last great undiscovered food cultures of Europe.” With a relatively plant-centric cuisine and an ancient winemaking tradition, it is well suited for the moment, in which both wine consumption and anxiety about the environment are on the rise, perhaps not unrelatedly. It’s not just the allure of Georgian gastronomy that has led to its growing visibility abroad. The Georgian National Tourism Administration is working hard to convert buzz into durable economic opportunity. In 2018, the agency brought eight hundred foreign journalists to Georgia, treating them to hospitality that, according to one participant, “borders on pathological.” On one trip, a group of American wine writers were shuttled to a vineyard in western Georgia, where a husband-and-wife winemaking team introduced them, as a writer from Vice recalled, to “a fresh and fruity rosé,” made from a little-known grape. “Somm crack juice,” one of the participants observed. (Never leave home without a glib comparison.) Goodbye, Riesling; hello, Orbeluri Ojaleshi.

Last year, more international tourists visited Georgia than ever before. To welcome the six millionth, in late December, 2016, the G.N.T.A. devised an elaborate stunt, which a promotional video on social media called “a once-in-a-lifetime kind of a dinner, one that the whole country took care of.” The tourist, Jesper Black, of the Netherlands, landed in Tbilisi and, emerging from the baggage claim, was greeted by a driver bearing a sign with his name. (If he was indeed randomly selected, it was lucky for Georgian tourism that he is a travel blogger who speaks English.) He was driven across town. The motorcade stopped in front of a big house, where a man in a suit waited on a red carpet. “Hello, Jesper,” he said. “My name is Giorgi Kvirikashvili. I am the Prime Minister of this country.” Inside, the two men enjoyed a feast composed of dishes that had been selected in a vote by the people of Georgia.