Tbilisi Coffee Guide: The Best Cafes by Neighbourhood

Tbilisi was a Nescafe city until very recently. Coffee was a spoonful of instant in a glass, or a thick cezve brew boiled in a copper pot and served with the grounds still settling. Specialty coffee arrived late, then arrived all at once.

Shavi opened its first cafe in 2021, when the number of places roasting their own beans in Georgia could be counted on one hand. OKRO followed in late 2023, Tsvari and Stamba Bakery in late 2025, Grind in 2026. The pace has not slowed. What follows is the map we would give a friend who drinks coffee seriously and has four days here, organised by neighbourhood, with the address of every place and what it charges for a cappuccino.

What a coffee costs

Prices have converged. A cappuccino is 9 to 12 GEL at almost every specialty cafe in the city, and the two outliers are both understandable: Pulp starts at 7 GEL for the small size, and Matasse, which is a patisserie that happens to serve coffee, goes to 15 for the large. At 2.61 GEL to the dollar, the mid-point is about four dollars, which is still half of what the same cup costs in most of Europe.

The table is the whole list. The last column is the laptop policy, because in Tbilisi that is the second thing you need to know: yes means open a laptop whenever, and the rest is explained under each neighbourhood.

Vera and Rustaveli: the coffee district

If you only have one morning, spend it here. Vera sits between Rustaveli Avenue and Vake Park, it is quiet and leafy, and five serious cafes are within a fifteen-minute walk of each other.

Coffee LAB at 24 Paliashvili Street was one of the first places in the city to roast in house, and it still supplies a long list of other cafes and restaurants, which means you have probably drunk their coffee without being told. The Paliashvili room is the cosy one, with booth seating, and it runs 09:00 to 20:30 daily. A cappuccino is 9 GEL. There are five other branches, including the roastery at Lisi Lake.

OKRO Coffee Roastery at 14 Nikoladze Street opened in late 2023 on the ground floor of a new hotel and roasts on site, with green coffee from Guatemala, Colombia and Ethiopia. The room mixes graffiti with old Caucasian carpets and low light, and the pastry counter is run by a French pastry chef, Laurent Deruere, who bakes with about a dozen different flours. Cappuccino 12 GEL, laptops at designated tables.

Pulp at 22 Janashia Street started in 2019 in a room with a two-square-metre kitchen and now bakes its own sourdough and laminated pastry. Go for the cardamom buns. Coffee from 7 GEL, natural wine in the evening, laptops in one designated area.

Shavi has its original branch at 40 Zandukeli Street, bright and plain, with bar and table seating. Ask most people in Tbilisi where the best coffee is and this is the name you get. Cappuccino 10 to 12 GEL. Laptops are allowed in a zone and within set hours, which is worth checking before you settle in for three hours.

Slow at 17 Mtskheta Street is one of two cafes that carried on after the Moscow-based Chernyi Cooperative left Georgia in August 2025. It pours Shavi and its own roast by day and turns into a natural wine bar at night.

Two more worth the detour. Mova Maisi, at 9 Mikheil Zandukeli Dead End on the hill behind Rustaveli metro, is a cafe in an overgrown courtyard with a greenhouse that is heated through the winter, and it takes dogs. Stamba Bakery opened inside the Stamba Hotel at 14 Kostava Street in late 2025 and bakes with Georgian wheat from the hotel group's own farm at Udabno, which is a short way from David Gareja. It is the cheap way to sit inside a building most visitors photograph from the doorway.

Sololaki and the Old Town: the good-looking rooms

Sololaki has the best interiors in the city, because the cafes moved into heritage buildings rather than building new ones. Shavi's second branch, at 28 Asatiani Street, occupies a garage with a shaded courtyard behind it, and it is the best outdoor table on this page.

Grind opened in 2026 in an underground space at 14 Machabeli Street: monochrome, minimal, deliberately at odds with the Sololaki street above it, with windows up to Machabeli and a lower level with more seating. Espresso, filter, cold brew, matcha and tea, cappuccino 9 GEL, and filled donuts from the Ganjina bakery.

Coffee Place at 24 Tabidze Street is the first fully plant-based cafe in Tbilisi, in the bottom of a heritage corner building with frescoed ceilings and a bay window over the street. Oat, coconut and banana milk are the standard, not the surcharge.

Baba Bakery at 4 Machabeli Street, a minute from Freedom Square, bakes croissants, chaussons, cruffins and kouign-amanns in house every morning and pours coffee made on beans roasted in Tbilisi by Mamuli. Santino at 15 Atoneli Street, near the Dry Bridge market, is a pavement cafe with a menu of coffee recipes from a dozen countries and a firm no-laptops rule; its second branch at 3/5 Tabidze Street off Freedom Square opened in 2024 and is open 24 hours, which makes it the answer to a 3 am arrival.

In the Old Town proper, Cafe Leila at 18 Shavteli Street is a former Persian candy shop and the most photographed cafe in the city, with a cherry tree outside that is worth timing a spring visit for. Matasse 1822 at 40 Vertskhli Street is a patisserie in Tiffany blue whose honey cake gets named as the best in Tbilisi more often than anyone else's.

Chugureti and Fabrika: where the new places open

Across the river, the streets around Marjanishvili metro and the Fabrika complex have taken over as the part of town where cafes open first. Shavi's third branch, at 17 Ninoshvili Street, arrived in 2024 and is the biggest of the three.

Tsvari Roasters, further along at 64 Ninoshvili Street, opened in late 2025: concrete floors, custom wood, soft pink finishes, beans roasted in house and brewed on a Sanremo machine, with single origins that rotate. It looks out at the padel courts near the new Ninoshvili Bazaar complex, in a pocket of the city that is changing fast.

Slow's other branch is at 36 Aghmashenebeli Avenue, on the ground floor of the Chavchanidze House of 1903, which once held a wine shop selling vintages from the German colony at Katharinenfeld, now Bolnisi. The avenue outside is pedestrianised, so the patio tables are the point.

Vake and Saburtalo: the working end

These are residential districts with no old town charm and the best conditions for getting something done. Coffee LAB's Kazbegi Avenue branch, at number 27 in Saburtalo, is open 09:00 to 23:00 daily, has two floors inside and a terrace where each umbrella has a power socket built into its stand. The Axis Towers branch at 37 Chavchavadze Avenue keeps the same hours; Bazari Orbeliani at 3a Vekua Street runs 10:00 to 23:00, and the Lisi Lake roastery 09:00 to 22:00.

Puri Guliani has a cafe on Saarbrucken Square by the Dry Bridge and an express branch at 37 Abashidze Street in Vake. Coffee is made on Ethiopian and Brazilian beans, and the thing to order is the ponchiki, the filled Tbilisi donut. The Saarbrucken room, with tables over the river, is one of the easier places in the city to sit for a few hours.

What to order

The menus read as they would anywhere: espresso, americano, cappuccino, flat white, filter, cold brew. Two things are worth explaining.

RAF coffee turns up on almost every menu. Espresso, cream and vanilla sugar steamed together into something closer to a dessert than a coffee, it came into Georgia through the same post-Soviet pipeline as most of the city's cafe habits. Nobody claims it is specialty coffee. It is very good in February.

Cezve coffee, finely ground and boiled in a small copper pot, is what Georgians drank before all of this and is still served in bakeries and older neighbourhood places for a fraction of a cappuccino. It arrives with the grounds in the cup. Let it settle, then drink the top two thirds and stop.

Beyond that: hand brews and cold brew are on at the roasters, Coffee LAB does pour-over and French press as well as espresso, and Santino runs a long list of international preparations, from Vietnamese drip to a Tenerife barraquito.

Ordering is one of the few daily exchanges where a word of Georgian changes the temperature of the room. The counter vocabulary is short: madloba, and how to say it is most of it.

Working from a cafe

Tbilisi is genuinely good at this, but the rules are not uniform and they are rarely written down. Coffee LAB, Grind, Coffee Place, Baba, Tsvari, Puri Guliani, Mova Maisi, Slow and The Museum are laptop-friendly without qualification. Shavi limits laptops to a zone and to set hours. OKRO and Pulp have designated tables and areas. Stamba Bakery has its own laptop areas. Santino does not allow them.

Beans to take home

Five of the cafes on this page roast their own: Shavi, Coffee LAB, OKRO, Tsvari and Slow. All of them sell beans by the bag, and Coffee LAB also sells grinders and French presses at its branches and has a stall inside Bazari Orbeliani, which is the one-stop option if you are shopping for several things at once. Ask what was roasted most recently rather than what is on the shelf, and ask them to leave it whole if you have a grinder at home.

Things worth knowing

Coffee arrives sweet unless you say otherwise at ordinary cafes, though not at the roasters. The word is ushaqro, without sugar.

Weekend late mornings are the crush. Brunch has taken hold here, and from about 11:00 on Saturday and Sunday the good rooms fill. Weekday mornings are the opposite: quiet, and the best time to sit somewhere properly.

Smoking. The 2018 law bans smoking in enclosed public places, but adults-only bars can opt out and some cafes ignore it. Terraces are fair game everywhere, so sit inside if smoke bothers you.

Cards work almost everywhere on this list, contactless included. The exceptions are small bakeries and older places, where a 20 GEL note solves the problem. More on paying for things in our guide to money, ATMs and tipping.

If you want the morning version of this page, with bakeries, what Georgians actually eat before noon and where the weekend queues are, that is the Tbilisi breakfast and brunch guide. For the evening, the same streets turn into wine bars.