Brick Oven Bread – Brighton Beach Brooklyn
Bread? Cheese? Tandoor style oven? Brick Oven Bread is a small bakery in the heart of Brighton Beach that servers up traditional bread and baked goods of Georgia (the country in Western Asia, not the state), and the star of the show is Khachapuri; a flat, soft, round leavened bread filled with a piping hot layer of a traditional Georgian cheese called Sulguni. It simply oozes flavor, and like a lot of bread, it truly shines when it’s fresh out of the oven. Different regions of Georgia make different styles of this same bread. At Brick Oven Bread, they have the popular round version (Imeretian/Imeruli), as well as a flaky, almost pastry like version. Unless you speak Georgian, you’ll be trading fragmented sentences of broken English, which is very normal in Brighton Beach, although the native tongue is usually Russian in this neck of the woods. Just keep smiling, say thank you, and be grateful that you live in a city that can showcase the best of so many diverse cultures.
Quick History: According to folklore legend, Khachapuri was first made by a Georgian Housewife that had nothing to offer a visiting king, so she stuffed various local cheeses into a traditional “puri” bread and baked it in a traditional Georgian clay oven called a Tone. There are several versions of Khachapuri, representing different regions of the country. Imeruli seems to be the most popular, and Khachapuri is widely considered the national food of Georgia, found easily from street vendors to restaurants across the country in it’s various forms.
Brick Oven Bread, 109 Brighton 11th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11235
