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Tbilisi

Tbilisi's culinary record

Tbilisi is a melting pot of a little over one million people. It’s a collision of modern and ancient, neither Europe nor Asia – singularly “Tbilisi” where tradition is the overriding theme. Walk down a given street and you will smell the seductive aroma of fresh bread wafting out of old cellar bakeries, baked in cylindrical ovens just like it always has. Listen to the refrain of “matzoni, matzoni,” being sung by women lugging bags packed with jars of the fresh sour yogurt at eight in the morning in every neighborhood.

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Upcoming Tbilisi Food Tours

On this Tbilisi food tour – an epic day of eating – we’ll explore some of the roots of the often-overlooked but incredibly delicious Georgian cuisine. Together we’ll sample a range of dishes that reveal unexpected culinary influences, ones which the Georgian kitchen accumulated over centuries of rule under Eastern and Western powers, and also as a crucial stopping point along Silk Road’s trans-continental trade routes.

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Tbilisi

Salobie Bia: Simple Pleasures

This story starts with a hamburger, a juicy, perfectly grilled patty between a pair of fresh, no-frill homemade buns and the standard trimmings. As burgers become part of the culinary landscape in Tbilisi, we find that many cooks have a tendency to get too slick with a dish that loathes pretension. But this place, Burger House, nailed the balance between originality and straightforwardness. While sopping the drippings up with finger-thick fries we saw a hamburger story in the making and filed the idea away in our bucket list of food tales. A year or so later, walking down Machebeli Street in Sololaki, we saw a little basement joint named Salobie Bia with a Gault & Millau (a French restaurant guide) sign above the door and decided to investigate further. Several lip-smacking meals later, we learned that the chef and co-owner of this place is the same guy who was responsible for those impressive burgers.

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Tbilisi

Vino Underground: Wine Heaven

Ènek poured a rosy-colored splash of wine into our glasses, avidly explaining how this particular Aladasturi grape vine was meticulously cultivated in its native west Georgia. In a tasting ritual uncommon in Georgia, we swirled it, sniffed it and savored the flavor as it caressed our tongues. Here in the “cradle of wine,” the land where viticulture is believed to have originated 8,000 years ago, wine is customarily poured into a water glass and “tasted” in one long drag, until drained. But in this cozy cellar in the heart of Tbilisi’s historic Sololaki neighborhood, seven winemakers have come together to offer an alternative convention to winemaking and consumption. They call it Vino Underground, but we call it wine heaven.

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Tbilisi

Alubali: Comfortably Stuffed

Going to dinner at a Georgian restaurant typically means having to fast all day. The table will bulge with must-orders: tomato and cucumber salad, badrijani (eggplant stuffed with garlic and walnuts), an assortment of cheeses and wild greens, and probably pkhali (vegetable pate with walnuts) too. There will be meat, lots of meat – lamb, pork, veal and chicken that will be stewed, baked and roasted – and bread to clean the plate with. Perhaps there will be a grilled trout. And don’t forget the khachapuri, because that is just the way it is. After several hours at the table, we will make our final toasts, take one last look at the leftovers, maybe snatch a farewell nibble at a loose chive or slice of cucumber and then waddle out of the joint, with greasy grins and logy eyelids. We grunt while we plop into the taxi and groan as we struggle to climb out when we get home.

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Latest Stories: Tbilisi

The interior walls of Kitchen Bon are painted a fiery orange. The restaurant is set back, inlaid like a jewel into Kostava, one of Tbilisi’s main avenues, and when open it glows invitingly amid the concrete – easy to miss, if you’re not looking. Chi, the owner, and her sous chef Kana gracefully navigate the small square open kitchen, lined on two sides by stools and countertops, deep-frying tempura, spooning rice, folding nori, pouring beer from a tap. An ever-present Stolichnaya vodka bottle stands beside the rice cooker, beading in the heat. Chi is sarcastic, warm, quick-tempered, funny. Her regular customers address her in tones of mingled fear and admiration; she’s one of those people you reflexively want to impress.

When Tbilisi wine enthusiast Irakli Chkhaidze first pitched his unconventional business idea over a decade ago – a wine store where customers could drink bottles at retail price rather than marked-up bar prices – his entrepreneurial friends dismissed it as unworkable. After all, most wine bars derived their profits from significant markups on alcoholic beverages. Moreover, at the time, many locals showed greater interest in foreign wines than local varieties, having easy access to family-made Georgian wines. Yet the former economist remained adamant. “I had no money, but I realized I had to do it myself,” says the now-42-year-old. Describing himself as “familiar with figures but hating figures,” he abandoned his managerial position at one of Georgia's largest pharmaceutical companies to pursue an MBA in Food and Wine in Bologna, Italy.

Tbilisi’s self-proclaimed first Chinese restaurant opened in 1998, with a competitor following a few years later. Both restaurants remained the only gastronomic reference for local Georgians seeking East Asian flavors for decades. The food, while decent at both establishments, seemed to model the style originally concocted by early Chinese immigrants to the US, with cornstarch and oyster sauce-heavy, sweet-and-sour sauces dominating the menu, and spice levels adapted to the sensitive western palate. The opening of Xinjian Sasadilo in 2018 marked a change, as it was one of the first local eateries in Tbilisi to serve authentic western Chinese dishes, with their signature hand pulled Uighur noodles and dry chili and star anise-infused spicy chicken dapanji.

In Georgia, there are certain dishes that everyone associates with Orthodox Easter: paska, a sweet panettone-like bread and chakapuli, a lamb stew. However, there is another Georgian Easter tradition, one often overlooked: nazuki. Beautifully glazed and filled with raisins and spices, in recent years these fluffy sweet breads have become associated almost exclusively with the village of Surami in the Kartli region. In this small settlement between Tbilisi and Kutaisi in the West, huts line the side of the highway, each with a tone (a cylindrical traditional oven), a baker and a family nazuki recipe.

Walk down a given street in Tbilisi and you will smell the seductive aroma of fresh bread wafting out of old cellar bakeries, baked in cylindrical ovens just like it always has. Listen to the refrain of “matzoni, matzoni,” being sung by women lugging bags packed with jars of the fresh sour yogurt at eight in the morning in every neighborhood. We used to boast how Georgia’s food culture and Tbilisi’s restaurants were some of the world’s best-kept secrets, but the word is out, and we’re good with that. Georgia has a bottomless, wild culinary spirit full of rewarding surprises, and we’ve been diving into it for more than a decade here at Culinary Backstreets. For us, it doesn’t matter whether the khinkali we eat are meat-packed grenades or pesto- and mushroom-stuffed buttons. Either way, they’re Georgian. All they have to be is tasty. We’ve collected a sample of our most essential Tbilisi restaurants, so you can get your own taste of Georgia.

From the bustling Melikishvili Avenue, we ascended a few steps to arrive at Praktika. The venue features three rooms adorned with white walls, well-worn parquet flooring, and standard-issue tables and chairs. Its resemblance to study rooms is no coincidence; Praktika is situated just a stone's throw away from Tbilisi State University, the city’s largest university, most of the customers are students, and the space is a former language school. The café’s humble appearance is not suprising. Praktika, which opened its doors in August 2022, owes its inception to a crowdfunding initiative led by the socialist movement Khma (meaning "voice" in Georgian). Its primary aim was to establish, as they put it, a “people’s café that will provide affordable and tasty food to students, workers, working students and everyone else in need.”

Few locals, let alone tourists have reached the isolated mountain village of Ghebi in Georgia’s northern borderlands of Racha. However, many have passed through the doors of its namesake basement restaurant in the bustling left bank district of Marjanishvili in downtown Tbilisi. For more than a decade, the eatery has been steadily serving up comfort food from the region including lobio, the red bean stew with or without the aged Racha salted ham called lori, bean-stuffed pies called lobiani, and skhmeruli, the garlic saturated pan-roasted chicken dish. Located on Aghmashenebeli Avenue, which is more well known for its profusion of Turkish lokantasi diners with ready-made buffet spreads and Arab restaurants that attract many of the city’s foreign residents and visitors from South Asia and the Middle East, Ghebi remains a staunch local haunt frequented by tables of Georgian men toasting their chachas late into the evening over tables loaded with food.

There’s no denying 2024 has been a year of political discontent that has permeated into all aspects of life in Tbilisi – including the culinary. Massive protests against the incumbent Georgian Dream party started in spring when it pushed forward a controversial law that many saw as emulating a Russian one and pushing the country towards Moscow-style autocracy. Even bigger protests broke out more recently when the ruling party announced they are suspending Georgia’s efforts to join the European Union, further fueling fears about the country’s orientation. For the CB crew, the political turbulence made this year one to revisit small backstreet joints that have withstood the test of time, such as Old Time Pub, the watering hole serving sausages and beer from Soviet times, and the pelmeni stronghold of Dumplings N1 that’s been serving some of the city’s best Slavic dumplings for over a decade.

Anyone who takes more than a fleeting interest in Georgia’s traditional cuisine beyond the inescapable khachapuri and khinkali will probably agree that walnuts are the real gastronomic workhorse of Georgian cuisine. This versatile ingredient is deftly woven into a range of delightful dishes from soups and salads to rich, creamy stews, of which the Megrelian kharcho is one of our favorites. A slow-cooked dish of beef or veal simmered in creamy walnut sauce tempered with fried onions, garlic, and a generous amount of spices including coriander, a local variety of blue fenugreek (Trigonella caerulea) and marigold flowers (often called “the poor man’s saffron”), Megrelian kharcho is a heavy, hearty dish. It’s usually served with corn grits, locally called ghomi, or the cheese-saturated version called elargi – a combination that often calls for loosening the belt after indulging.

Situated near a school, Tbilisi’s London Park brims with life, with children and teenagers enjoying the playground or relaxing on benches around a modest fountain. Although close to some of the city's busiest tourist streets, the park is flanked by unrenovated buildings and lacks a proper lawn. In a way, it has maintained the old atmosphere of Tbilisi: raw, unpretentious, yet joyful. Next to the fountain stands a small, glass-walled commercial space, often unnoticed by passersby who might not guess its purpose at first glance. This spot has had several incarnations – most recently as an Asian fusion food stall, before that as a shwarma booth, and originally as a café called London Bar. Now, the word “Rosa” is inscribed in both Georgian and Latin letters on its walls.

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