Food guide
Eating in Georgia: How to Read a Menu as a Map of the Country
Georgian food is one of the genuine reasons to come, and it is far more regional than visitors expect. The single most useful thing to know is that the dishes are named after the places that made them: Imeruli, Megruli, Adjaruli and Kakhuri are not flavour descriptions but regions, and once that clicks a Georgian menu stops being an alphabet problem and becomes a map. The cooking itself is built on ingredients that recur everywhere — walnuts, herbs, cheese, pomegranate, plum, garlic and a great deal of bread — and it manages the rare trick of being both hearty and genuinely vegetable-forward.
Updated 2026-08-16
Khachapuri, and why every region claims a different one
Khachapuri is cheese bread, and it is not one dish. Imeruli, the version from Imereti in the centre-west, is a round flatbread with the cheese enclosed inside — the everyday default, and the one most Georgians mean by the plain word. Megruli, from Samegrelo, is the same thing with more cheese baked across the top, which is exactly as good an idea as it sounds. Achma, from the western mountains, abandons the bread shape altogether for layered sheets of dough and cheese closer to a lasagne.
The one visitors photograph is Adjaruli, from the Black Sea coast around Batumi: an open boat of dough with a raw egg and a slab of butter dropped into the molten cheese at the last moment. It arrives at the table unfinished on purpose. You stir the egg and butter through the cheese with the pointed end of the boat, then tear off pieces of the crust and dip. It is enormous, it is a meal rather than a side, and ordering one each is the most common over-ordering mistake in the country. It belongs to Adjara, and it is unquestionably better eaten within sight of the sea it comes from.
Order by region and you will eat well and differently in each part of the country, which is the whole argument for not settling on a favourite in the first week.
Khinkali, and how to eat them without giving yourself away
Khinkali are large pleated dumplings, most often filled with spiced minced meat, and the filling releases broth as they cook. That broth is the entire point and it is also the trap. They arrive hot, they are eaten with the hands, and a fork is the clearest possible signal that someone has not eaten them before — puncture one on the plate and the broth is gone.
The method is simple. Hold the dumpling by the thick twisted knot at the top, turn it upside down, bite a small opening in the side, and drink the broth out before eating the rest. The knot itself is not eaten: it is dough handle, deliberately underdone, and the pile of them left on the plate is how everyone counts what they ate. Black pepper on top is standard; sauce is not, and asking for one is the second tell.
Fillings vary — meat, cheese, mushroom, potato — and mountain versions in Khevsureti and Tusheti are plainer and heavier because that is what high-altitude cooking is. Order fewer than you think you want. They are much larger than they look on the menu.
Walnuts, herbs, and why vegetarians do unusually well here
The backbone of Georgian cooking is the walnut, ground into sauces and pastes in a way that has no close equivalent in European food. Pkhali are the clearest example: vegetables — spinach, beetroot, aubergine, green beans — chopped fine and bound with walnut, garlic and herbs, served cold in small colourful mounds and eaten with bread. Bazhe is the walnut sauce that arrives over chicken or fish; satsivi is its richer, more ceremonial cousin. Aubergine rolls filled with walnut paste and topped with pomegranate seeds appear on practically every table in the country.
This is why Georgia is an unexpectedly excellent country to travel in as a vegetarian, and the reason is historical rather than modern: the Orthodox calendar includes long fasting periods during which animal products are avoided, so the cuisine developed a deep, genuinely traditional vegetable repertoire rather than an accommodating afterthought. Ask for the fasting dishes by that description and you will be understood immediately.
Around all of it there is bread — shoti, baked stuck to the wall of a clay tone oven, pulled out in curved blades and best eaten within the hour — and cheese, most often the stretchy, salty sulguni or the crumblier imeruli. On the roadside you will see churchkhela hanging in strings like candles: walnuts threaded on a cord, dipped repeatedly in thickened grape must until they set. They look like sweets and are closer to a farmer's energy bar.
Wine at the table, and what happens when the toasts begin
Wine in Georgia is not a tasting culture, it is a table culture, and that distinction changes how a visitor should behave around it. It is poured generously, it is drunk with food and company rather than analysed, and the amber skin-contact whites that made Georgian wine famous abroad are simply what has been on the table for centuries. The vineyards are mostly in Kakheti; the behaviour around the bottle is the same at every table in the country.
Those mechanics are worth knowing before you find yourself inside them. A Georgian meal with any ceremony to it runs on toasts rather than on free conversation, led by one person who sets the subject each round. You drink at the toast rather than sipping between them, which means the pace is decided for you, and the glass will be refilled without being asked. Beer is generally not raised in toasts and doing so is treated as a joke rather than an insult.
If you would rather not drink much or at all, the workable move is not refusal but restraint: keep the glass, let it be filled, drink a token amount at each toast, and nobody will press. Saying you are driving is understood everywhere and ends the question immediately. What does not work is trying to opt out of the toasting itself, because the toasting is the meal — a long table in Georgia is an event with a structure, and joining that structure at your own pace is both entirely acceptable and the best way to spend an evening in the country.