On four Friday evenings this October, a room inside a converted textile mill complex in Greenville will fill with the smell of cheese bread, the clink of amber wine poured from clay-aged bottles, and a word most South Carolinians have never said aloud: gagimarjos.
The occasion is a supra—a traditional Georgian feast and toasting ritual—hosted at Keipi, a nonprofit restaurant tucked into the Hampton Station development at 1320 Hampton Avenue Extension. Each ticket buys a seat at a long communal table, a five-course Georgian feast, imported wine, individual cocktails, and something harder to price: a night of structured, deliberate toasting led by a toastmaster known as a tamada. The October dates are the 2nd, 16th, 23rd, and 30th, with dinner beginning at 6 p.m.
The word "keipi" itself means a toasting dinner in the Republic of Georgia, and the restaurant's own description of the evening is disarmingly direct: "Mingle with strangers and break bread with your loved ones." That pairing—strangers and loved ones at the same table—is not a marketing flourish. It is the whole point.
Georgia, the small Caucasus nation wedged between the Black Sea and the mountains, has spent millennia being invaded and occupied by larger powers, and has spent just as long perfecting the art of the table as a way of remembering who it is. The supra is the centerpiece of that culture: a meal that can stretch for hours, ordered not by courses alone but by toasts. A tamada stands to lead, offering themes—beauty, friendship, love, family, the dead—and guests fill in the specifics with toasts of their own. Traditionally, each toast ends with a full glass drained. At Keipi, mercifully, that particular quirk is relaxed.
The restaurant's origin story runs through a former Peace Corps volunteer named John Heers. In the 1990s, after a stint in the Peace Corps and other work abroad, Heers traveled to Georgia to volunteer in the aftermath of a brutal civil war. There, widows he worked with in the Caucasus Mountains introduced him to the supra. As the story is told by First Things Foundation, the nonprofit Heers later founded, the poverty-stricken Georgians loaded a generous table with food and wine and offered him toasts that got to the heart of his humanity, making him feel at home in a foreign land. He brought the ritual home to his family and friends in New York.
Twenty years later, Heers founded First Things Foundation, a mission organization that sends field workers to live simply for two years in isolated and impoverished communities abroad, learning the language and sharing the ordinary hardships of a place until they are trusted enough to help local people build what those communities already know they need—a well, a school, a farm, a clinic. Keipi Restaurant, established in Greenville in 2022, is the foundation's American headquarters and, in its own words, the Home of the American Supra. All available profits go back to the foundation's work.
The logic behind opening a restaurant as a humanitarian operation is laid out plainly in the foundation's own materials. Abroad, field workers enter a village where shared life already exists. At home, the problem is the opposite: many Americans live near one another without any shared place where they are known and received. "Keipi opens that place in Greenville," the foundation writes. "The American Supra gives the table an order. Guests and hosts meet there first. People begin to see the neighbor in front of them."
A Garden & Gun account of a supra at Keipi captures how that plays out in practice. Heers clinks a glass and tells twenty-five mostly-strangers, "Tonight, we'll go to Georgia." Amber wine fermented in underground clay pots is already flowing. Heers is the tamada; a man named Bobby serves as merikipe, the keeper of full glasses. The room practices gagimarjos—"to you the victory"—with the fumble-tongued enthusiasm of Americans trying on a new language. Then Heers explains the structure: he gives a toast on a general theme, and the guests color in the specifics, each offering a detail from their own life. The result is a dinner that functions less like a restaurant reservation and more like a room full of people being slowly introduced to one another on purpose.
The supra has since outgrown a single Greenville dining room. Keipi now hosts community keipis on Fridays and private keipis any day of the week, and its toastmasters will perform at weddings, conferences, birthday parties, or even funerals. For events outside Greenville, the restaurant points people to a partner organization, the Supra Dinner Society, a 501(c)(3) founded by two of Heers's protégés with the stated mission of healing a divided American society, starting at the table. The society credits its founders with helping create the first restaurant in America to offer supras—Keipi, in Greenville.
There are practical limits. Each keipi is capped at 25 seats, though the restaurant says it may accommodate more depending on circumstances, and sold-out dates can sometimes be worked around by emailing the events contact. The restaurant also makes a point of addressing the wine directly: it does not encourage people to drink, but when they do, it works hard to get them home safely, and it suggests arriving by rideshare or taxi. "All things are possible when we work together for good," the signup page reads.
What a guest actually gets for the ticket price is a five-course feast of Georgian cooking—khachapuri, the cheese bread, among the dishes the restaurant is best known for—paired with wines drawn from a winemaking tradition roughly 8,000 years old. What they get beyond that is harder to itemize. The restaurant's own framing is that it is "rediscovering our shared humanity one glass at a time."
For a state whose dining scene runs on shrimp and grits, barbecue, and the familiar rhythms of a reservation and a check, a Friday night spent toasting strangers in a language you just learned is genuinely unusual. It is also, by design, a fixed-price table open to anyone rather than a reserved-seat show. The tamada does not perform for the room. He hands the room a form and lets it fill itself in.
On October 2nd, 16th, 23rd, and 30th, the table will be set again at Hampton Station. The first toast will go up at 6 p.m. The rest, as the supra has always worked, is up to whoever is sitting there.