THE GUEST IS FROM GOD
The GEORGIA EDITION, Part I
Today we’re announcing our first EDITION, which in many ways feels inevitable for LINEAR. For the last few years, we’ve written about places one story at a time. But there’s more to understanding a place than reading about where to stay or what to see.
Only once you understand the people, the architecture, the traditions, and the daily rituals do the hotels, cafés, galleries, and neighborhoods begin to make sense.
It would’ve been easy — predictable, even — to begin with Paris, London, Melbourne, or New York. We admire them enormously, as some of the world’s great design capitals. But for our first EDITION, we found ourselves drawn somewhere that felt a little more LINEAR.
We wanted to begin with a place still in the process of defining itself, where architecture reflects not just changing tastes but changing circumstances, where creativity feels less like an aesthetic pursuit than a way of reclaiming the nation’s story.
So for our first EDITION, we’re sending Jackson Greathouse Fall to Tbilisi.
More than three decades after independence, Georgia remains a nation actively negotiating its identity — a negotiation made literal by the roughly 20% of its internationally recognized territory still under Russian occupation. You can feel it in projects like Fabrika and The Telegraph Hotel, which reimagine Soviet relics into spaces for community and creativity. You can feel it in a generation of designers, architects, restaurateurs, and hoteliers building something distinctly their own.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll share his dispatches, along with locally curated guides, interviews, and collections.
This is the GEORGIA EDITION.
THE GUEST IS FROM GOD
Words by Jackson Greathouse Fall
My airport routine is precious to me after two years of full-time traveling and living, as I like to say, in the world. Check bag, hit security, saunter through duty free, spritz of the perfume I secretly love and refuse to ever actually buy. I dig waiting in line. I like looking for the windsock when the plane taxis. I like watching the little wing flaps come up when we touch down. At thirty years of age, I still text my parents before every flight I board, usually after security, because ever since I started living this way — on the road, on the move, in time zones that keep stretching farther from Central Standard — it has gotten harder and harder to be in the same place at the same time as the people who made me.
The day before I flew to Georgia for the first time, my dad texted me a story. He’d been chatting with a waitress in a Jersey diner who turned out to be from Tbilisi. She had shown him pictures of khinkali — the twisty soup dumplings that I’d soon be eating not for every meal... but for many meals — and khachapuri, the baked bread boat full of molten cheese. She told him that, “If he needs anything let me know, I will call my cousins in the police.” It was the first real instance of Georgian hospitality I received, even indirectly, before I’d ever set foot in the country. I landed with my phone already full of tips, warnings, and enthusiastic instructions from people who had been there before me. “It’s a hospitality culture,” everyone kept saying. I wanted to know what that meant.
Fortunately, I was being shipped off to Tbilisi with LINEAR Magazine, whose concierge has the uncanny and seemingly miraculous ability to secure anyone royalty-level treatment at the nicest hotels in the world. A few days in, I think I understand it better, but I’m still learning what it means to live in a hospitality culture. One thing I’m sure of: my dad’s diner waitress was deadass serious.
Aside from the petitioning my travel here, the paying for my hotel, and my financial compensation for this article, LINEAR has not instructed me to include any mention of their concierge service in my writing. I just feel so moved to shout it out because my experience traveling with them under my wings has been refreshingly delightful.
A cultural focus on hospitality, however you want to define it, crops up more and more the further east you move from the States. Before I left for Tangier last April, I made a solemn oath to myself that I would never refuse tea from a stranger if ever offered. As such I’ve had sweet glasses packed with mint on the floors of shops in souks and paper dixie cups of wood-fired Bedouin red tea with lemongrass and sage on the dunes of the Sahara. Most of the map, really, from the Atlas Mountains, over the Sahara, up through and across the mighty Bosphorus, these are all hospitality cultures. My hunch has always been that this has religious undertones — and specifically Islamic ones. I lean in when I hear about hospitality culture. It means the people are warm, food portions are large and keep coming, and there’s often an archetypal or actual grandmother involved. Tbilisi’s deep orthodox culture plays nicely into my expansion of this theory. They swear that they were the first people in the world to accept and adopt Christianity — but I’m not sure how true that is.
Georgians believe in a universal demonstration of this idea that a guest is not someone to be transacted upon. Take notes, America! A guest, be that in your restaurant, antique booth, or home, is a person whose arrival should indeed change the vibe of the room. It goes both ways. To be a guest in someone’s home means you never come empty-handed. In America, hospitality is usually a marketing catchall that translates synonymously to “service”. It’s something polished, priced, rated, and tipped 20% on. Or are we doing 25 now? Around Georgia’s mountain-valed capital of Tbilisi, what I kept encountering felt even older and more mythologically rooted than that. It felt like people actually gave a shit here.
What I’ve found in Tbilisi in a few short days is clear indication that there’s a broader kind of reverence for other people — for The Guest — that is plainly evident all around when you look outside of the individualistic bubble that we’ve built for ourselves in the west. That’s something we could all do to experience firsthand.
ARRIVALS
I stayed at The Telegraph, a former Soviet post office turned boutique hotel. At first brush, it’s straight out of the Ian Schrager hospitality-and-design playbook. That can be a good or a bad thing, depending on how you want to look at it. The Taschen books on the shelf. The pumping of a specific santal through the air ducts. The brass/wood/marble punch and fluted glass detail work. At first brush it’s a well designed hotel as any, but what stuck out to me was the people moving through it. No amount of design attention and detail work can outdo what is made so plainly evident by just hiring really good people.
I met a bellboy named Georgi on his first day at work — he was awkwardly trying to hold this absurdly oversized green velvet jacket together by clasping his hands behind his back so the jacket wouldn’t hang caddywhompus. When I joked that oversized blazers were in, he laughed and let his shoulders drop. Poor guy had buttons on that thing that looked like poker chips from the casino next door.
All the employees at The Telegraph are made to wear distinct and hilarious uniforms depending on what area of the hotel they work in, all of which look like something the costume department dug up from a Wes Anderson set. The maids are all older women with curled hair and they all wear the same black dresses with these ridiculous white ruffled collars. Once, I went into the lobby men’s room and there were five of them all cleaning the sink at once. I think they just hide in there to hang out. The hotel is, plainly, overstaffed. To me, the guest, this is undoubtedly a very good thing – it means I can have lobiani and cheesecake delivered to my room at two in the morning and it only takes ten minutes to get there.
When I needed a tailor to mend a hole in my pants, the concierge immediately arranged for them to be fixed while I was working out, so that when I got back to the changing room from the gym, my newly repaired trousers were freshly pressed and laid out on the bench for me. Stellar.
That’s it. That’s the difference between being nice and actually paying attention. That same concierge who, having had recommended me a specific dish at the hotel’s Grand Café restaurant the night before, tracked me down the following morning to — earnestly — ask how I liked it.
At breakfast, at dinner, in shops, in bars, in passing conversations, there’s an earnestness to the way people check in on you. At Honoré, a waiter set down my pan fried chicken livers in plump (sic) sauce, leaned in, and winked: “These chicken livers, it’s my childhood!” It was funny, and it summed up his whole philosophy. Food here means something to people. They’re excited to share their memories. Food is their inheritance and their pride. He continued on: “in Europe it’s like people order one dish and say, this is my dish, but in Georgia we never do this — we order three or four and share!”
Eating alone here is almost unheard of. For a solo traveler, that’s an excuse to make conversation with strangers – but it has also gotten me some odd glances from hosts and fellow diners. Two-tops in many restaurants are few and far between. The most authentic Georgian restaurants have these grand dining rooms with a few long banquet tables – of which one or two are always open. You never know when a guest is going to arrive.
The measure of a meal here is not the stack of plates in front of you; it’s the whole damn table. And boy, the tables keep growing.
