Here’s the elevator pitch: If you want to try quality Georgian food, go to a strip mall in suburban Wheeling.

Perhaps this small nation in the Caucasus is on your radar only because of its recent civil unrest. Perhaps, if you have any notion of Georgian food, it’s because you once ripped into an Adjaruli khachapuri — a boat-shaped flatbread filled with tangy, stretchy sulguni cheese, butter, and a runny egg yolk that one swirls into dairy goop heaven before eating. Perhaps you’re aware of Georgia’s now-fashionable qvevri wines, aged in egg-shaped clay vessels buried underground.

Let Stumara be your introduction to all of it and then some. Georgian food will surprise and charm, and maybe even elicit a new craving in you. It is all about colorful spreads and juicy soup dumplings, sour plums and nippy tarragon, grilled lamb kebabs and fried chicken. The more you explore this cooking, the more you find the romance in it.

Tamta Sanodze, a Georgian native, opened Stumara last April as a companion to Pirosmani, her two-year-old bakery and deli next door. It is not the Chicago area’s first Georgian restaurant — that may be Lake View’s Chicago Diplomat Cafe, which opened in 2017 — but it is the most ambitious, with a broad menu, deep wine list, and a clean, glossy setting filled with Georgian art and textiles. Sanodze hired European celebrity chef Davit Narimanishvili (who runs Nunuka in Madrid) to develop the menu and local chef Giorgi Gambarashvili to execute it.

Their kitchen aims high, offering a tour of their country’s best-loved dishes, but also indulges in fancy stylings. This approach saddles the food with too many visually arresting garnishes that are unnecessary, and with ambitious preparations that it can’t quite pull off. That’s an occasional bummer but not a deal breaker. Order well, and Stumara delivers.

After two visits, I know the move: Just get the bangers, all the dishes for which Georgia is famous. The menu proposes a variety of oven-baked flatbreads, but don’t be tempted to take your eyes off the prize, which is that Adjaruli khachapuri, a specialty of the Adjara region on the Black Sea. A helpful server will offer to swirl up the egg and cheese, which everyone at the table will observe like a pack of dogs eyeing a dangling steak. Try not to inhale.

You’ll want pkhali, brightly colored balls of chopped vegetables and ground walnuts, each dotted with a pomegranate aril. They are red with beet, emerald with spinach, or sea green with leek, and all delicious. They arrive, in traditional manner, with mchadi, a pan-fried puck of dense cornmeal batter that a Southerner would recognize as a hoe cake. I find down-home comfort in it, though all my guests took one bite and went, “Nope.” Shotis puri, a plain, oven-blistered flatbread, arrives gratis, and it provides a fine vehicle to eat them with instead.

Another classic starter, badrijani nigvzit, consists of long strips of fried eggplant rolled around a center of creamed walnuts seasoned with garlic and coriander, lovable despite their too-trendy coating of black vegetable ash. And no visit to a Georgian restaurant feels complete without khinkali, boiled soup dumplings shaped like little chemistry beakers. You grasp them by the dough knots at their tapered tops, upend them, and nibble until the juices from the beef and pork filling seep out.

Elect a designated driver to get you back home, because the rest of you will want to sample a glass or two of wine. Georgia, the world’s oldest viticultural region, produces terrific amber wines, the country’s term for skin-contact whites (they’re “orange wines” elsewhere). To my taste, one of the best on Stumara’s all-Georgian list is the Rkatsiteli varietal from Tilisma Winery. (Every bottle I’ve tried from Tilisma slaps.) The reds, also matured in qvevri vessels, are mostly simple, but the Saperavi varietal from Dakishvili Family Vineyards is a good place to start. It’s like gluggable pizza wine.

While all the appetizers offer a rollicking good time, the entrées tend toward subdued sophistication. You can tell they’re designed for a European dining public that likes its plates dressy and its flavors mild. Satsivi, a classic dish of chicken in walnut sauce, arrives as a bowl of turkey meatballs bobbing in a blandly creamy sauce. Lamb “skewers” don’t have a skewer in sight; rather, the chunks of meat have been removed and placed in a showy box filled with smoke. It’s a nice voilà moment, though the ultra-well-done meat is tough. My favorite entrée, chakapuli, is a hearty stew of veal, greens, and herbs, notably tarragon. The server repeatedly tried to warn us off, saying, “Only Georgian people like it.” Next time I’ll ask what else they like.

Desserts, too, are less successful and include that honey cake that seemingly every former Soviet republic favors and a layered meringue concoction, with either lemon or berries, called Opium. Both had spent too long in the fridge.

Though I haven’t eaten at a lot of Georgian restaurants in my life, I recall them fondly from a vacation 10 years ago in Russia, where they were the most recommended dining destinations from St. Petersburg to Moscow. At first I figured it was because no one can resist khachapuri. Soon, though, I began to see that Eastern Europeans love Georgian restaurants the way Americans go for Mexican and Europeans never tire of Italian. It’s the food of the south, a land of tomatoes, fresh herbs, and sunshiny flavors. The restaurants played up the folklore; we dined at tables under plastic grape trellises while costumed servers brought khachapuri and khinkali.

It seems all the more poignant now as the Georgian government buckles under Russian hegemony. I’d imagine many guests at Stumara raise their after-dinner glasses of chacha (Georgian grappa) to the protesters in the streets of Tbilisi.