MY FORMER HOME is Los Angeles. And in Southern California, the late, great Jonathan Gold was regarded as a saint. He was a vivid writer, a voracious eater, and a true appreciator of culture and cookery, turning over every stone in LA County to find where it lived. Gold was a champion of hole-in-the-wall restaurants, the ones usually housed in strip malls and run by immigrant families.
Like Detroit and its surrounding suburbs, Los Angeles is a sprawling city. In a 2017 Instagram post, Gold said in his “Five Rules for Dining in Los Angeles”: “The best choice is always the restaurant fifteen minutes further than you are willing to go.” So, when I heard that a Georgian restaurant, At Anano’s, had opened in Farmington Hills last year, I knew I’d be making the trip 15 minutes further than I’m usually willing to go.
Georgia is a relatively small country, with a population just shy of 4 million. It’s nestled on the eastern end of the Black Sea, south of Russia and north of Turkey, and between two formidable mountain ranges: the Greater Caucasus and Lesser Caucasus mountains. The country, surrounded by masses of land and sea, is something of a well-kept secret. It’s a hidden fortress located at the intersection of Eastern Europe and Western Asia, and the cuisine reflects that in delightfully unexpected ways.
After you’ve entered beneath the golden “At Anano’s” letters and found yourself a table, it’s best to start with the Adjarian khachapuri, which is perhaps the most well-known Georgian food. This style of khachapuri (a word that literally translates to “cheese bread”) is a bread boat of sorts — ripe for social media attention — filled with a tart, melty white cheese and topped with an egg yolk plus a pat of butter. The move here is to swirl the egg and butter into the cheese with a spoon, then dig in. The bread has tapered edges, and ripping them off is a perfect opening strategy, but you’ll eventually want to use a fork and knife to slice your way through this immensely satisfying dish.
Perhaps due to influence from the Arabic-speaking countries to the south, skewered chicken, beef, and pork dishes are commonplace in Georgia. Mtsvadi, or grilled meat skewers, will immediately resonate with diners familiar with shish kebab and shish taouk. Marinated pork shoulder is cubed and grilled over a live fire until succulent. Chicken breasts are prepared similarly, while beef kebabs sweat and caramelize over hot flames. Everything is juicy, kissed lightly with Georgian spices, and grilled long enough to produce crackling, charred edges.
I suggest going to At Anano’s with a group of four or more, which enables you to order the kingly Meat Assortment, a wide platter of various grilled meats brought to the table in a glorious heap. In addition to the aforementioned skewers, you’re served prehistoric-size ribs, marinated and charbroiled, which carry with them a sweet, peppery sting. The ribs are staggeringly good and currently my favorite in Metro Detroit. Under the pile of meat, hiding in a rolled piece of thin flatbread, you’ll also find a secret tube of beef kebab. On the outer edges of the platter lies a pile of herbs and vegetables like bell peppers, onions, and cilantro. It’s enough to feed four to six, and in my group, we passed around the ribs so that we could each take a bite, both a cavemanlike action and an adolescent “puff, puff, pass” tradition.
Georgian cuisine has ancient roots, its building-block ingredients going back thousands of years. As Georgia was one of the countries along the Silk Road, the food reflects the infusion of spices and ingredients available at the time. The temperate Georgian climate produces fertile soil that’s ideal for growing nuts. Walnuts are a linchpin in Georgian cooking: They bind ingredients, thicken otherwise thin sauces, and infuse anything they touch with a sweet earthiness.
Satsivi is one such dish where walnuts are used brilliantly. This traditional Georgian stew or dip — all depending on how you eat it — can be served hot or cold. Here, it’s served hot, and it reads almost like a nutty chicken curry. The trademark of a good satsivi is a thick, viscous sauce made of walnuts and herbs simmered in chicken broth. It’s rich and creamy and carries with it an unusually prominent walnut flavor. Big chunks of skewer-size chicken breasts are coated in the sauce, and the whole thing is served with an angular, buttery phyllo dough for dipping.
More walnuts grace some of the vegetarian dishes on the At Anano’s menu: The Georgian-style salad arrives in a colorful tower — thick wedges of tomato, long cucumber slices, and red onion slivers are piled into a building-like formation. The salad is dressed with a thick, sledgelike walnut paste that sticks to each fresh vegetable like mud.
Ajapsandali is a savory eggplant stew that features tomatoes, sweet peppers, and herbs and spices like coriander and fenugreek. It’s akin to ratatouille, a staple in southern Europe, but here it thrums with liveliness and excitement. Lobio, a simple dish of stewed pinto beans served in a two-handed pot, is strikingly similar to a pot of beans you’d receive as a side at a taco joint. There’s a worldly quality inherent to Georgian cuisine. At times, you’ll swear you’re enjoying something close to Mexican food, especially when eating dishes with stewed pinto beans, pork, and cilantro — signature components south of the American border. Heck, even the Imeretian khachapuri — a different, circular cheese-filled khachapuri — reads like a quesadilla. The kebabs and shish are on track with Arabic traditions and Levantine street food; the chicken satsivi reminds me of yellow curry. And the chvishtari balls stuffed with cheese possess a singularly fluffy, dense texture that feels a lot like Salvadoran pupusas.
Then there are the Georgian soup dumplings, aka khinkali, which are made in-house and sell out quickly. These are very much like Turkish manti or Chinese xiao long bao; the dumplings are filled with both broth and minced meat and produce a flowing rush of savoriness when you consume them. Pick them up daintily by their twisted knob and eat them whole. Georgian food bobs and weaves throughout the globe miraculously, and yet it remains distinctly its own thing.
On my drive home, I had a lot to ponder — the spirit of Jonathan Gold and the rich history of Georgian cuisine. But mostly, it’s the faint familiarity of the City of Angels that this whole experience recalled. The distance of the restaurant; the underrepresented culture; and the fact that it features a young immigrant chef and her family, and that it’s a restaurant in a strip mall right next to a 7-Eleven, all feel very much like LA to me. If there’s one thing I learned when I lived there, it’s that these types of unassuming restaurants are usually the ones that resonate the most.
Drive the extra 15 minutes when you can, because there’s usually a great restaurant waiting for you just a bit further.
At a Glance
- Price: $-$$
- Vibe: Lunch, dinner, a casual meal for groups
- Service: Attentive
- Sound level: Low to Moderate
- Dress code: None
- Open: Noon to 10 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday
- Reservations: Call to make a reservation, though it’s not required: 248-970-2696
- Parking: A parking lot is out front.
- Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible
At Anano’s is located at 29410 Orchard Lake Rd, Farmington Hills. Visit atananos.com for more information.
This story originally appeared in the October 2025 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
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