What to Eat in Georgia: The Dishes, Regions and Costs

Khinkali, per piece

1.50-3 GEL

Bakery khachapuri

3-8 GEL

Dinner for two

60-80 GEL

Fasting days

Wed and Fri

Georgian food is one of the reasons people extend their trip. It is a cuisine built on walnut, herbs, cheese and bread, cooked differently in every region, with a vegetable repertoire kept alive by the Orthodox fasting calendar and a wine culture older than any other. It is also cheap, generous and slow, and the rules of the table are not the ones you know. This page is the overview: what the dishes are, where they come from, how to order them and what they cost, checked in September 2026. For depth on the two famous ones, our khachapuri guide and khinkali guide take over; for where to eat in the capital, the Tbilisi restaurants guide.

The dishes to order first

Fourteen dishes cover a first week. Every restaurant with a Georgian menu has most of them; the regional ones are marked.

Khachapuri

Ordering khachapuri in Georgia is like ordering pizza in Italy: you need to say which one. It is the national dish, added to the country's intangible cultural heritage list on 22 January 2019, and every region has its own shape. Imeruli, from Imereti, is the round one filled with salted white Imeretian cheese and the one Georgians eat most. Adjaruli, from the Black Sea coast, is the open boat with a raw egg yolk and a pat of butter dropped in at the table; the shape is said to be the boat, the yolk the sun. Megruli, from Samegrelo, is the Imeruli with a second layer of cheese melted on top. Penovani, from Samtskhe-Javakheti, is made with puff pastry and sold square from bakery windows. Achma, from Abkhazia, is layered like a lasagne without sauce. Guruli, the Christmas pie of Guria, is a crescent with boiled egg inside; the Ossetian khabizgina has potato with the cheese; and the Svans fill theirs with meat and call it kubdari.

Eat an Adjaruli the local way: tear the bread from the sides and use it to stir the yolk and butter into the cheese before it sets, then eat from the outside in. A bakery Adjaruli is 3 to 8 GEL; the large one at Retro in Tbilisi is about 20 GEL and feeds two. The dough should be thin and slightly chewy and the cheese should pull; a thick, bready one is a sign of a kitchen cooking for tourists. Our khachapuri guide goes through every regional type and where to find them.

Khinkali

Khinkali come from the eastern mountains, Pshavi, Khevsureti, Mtiuleti and Khevi, where shepherds made them as a hot, portable meal for the winter. The original khevsuruli filling is coarsely chopped meat (lamb, beef or pork mixed), onion, chili, salt and cumin; the city version, kalakuri, adds coriander and parsley. Because the meat goes in raw, its juices are trapped inside during cooking, which is the whole point. Mushroom, potato and cheese fillings are standard, and the khinkali from the town of Pasanauri on the Georgian Military Highway are held to be the best in the country.

A khinkali is 1.50 to 3 GEL a piece in Tbilisi in 2026, the vegetarian fillings at the bottom of the range and lamb or aged cheese at the top. Klike's and Amo Rame in Sololaki, Cafe Daphna for late nights and Asi Khinkali for the biggest rooms are the capital's regulars; Pictograma and Khash-Khash serve the mountain styles. Our khinkali guide covers fillings, etiquette and the best kitchens in detail.

The vegetable dishes

Georgia is the easiest country in Europe to eat in without meat, and it is not a modern development. The Georgian Orthodox Church keeps the old fasting rules, no meat, dairy or eggs on Wednesdays and Fridays and through the four long fasts of the year, so every traditional kitchen has a class of dishes, samarkhvo, that are vegan by tradition. Pkhali is the one to start with: spinach, beetroot or cabbage minced with walnut, garlic, vinegar and herbs, formed into balls and topped with pomegranate seeds, usually served as a plate of three. Lobio is the bean dish, red kidney beans (a New World crop, in Georgia since the 1500s) cooked with coriander, walnut, garlic and marigold, served cold and mashed as lobio nigozit or hot in a clay pot with mchadi cornbread and pickles. Badrijani nigvzit is fried aubergine rolled around walnut paste; ajapsandali is the summer stew of aubergine, tomato and pepper; jonjoli is pickled bladdernut flowers, sharp and very Georgian; and the mushroom and potato khinkali are as ordinary as the meat ones. Kutaisi and Imereti are the heartland of this cooking, and the western tone bakeries sell lobiani, the bean-filled bread, next to the khachapuri.

The meat dishes

Mtsvadi is the grill: cubes of pork, veal or lamb on long flat skewers over embers, brought to the table with raw onion and pomegranate seeds and eaten with tkemali. It is the dish of the roadside and of every supra. Chakapuli is the spring stew, lamb or veal cooked with tarragon, unripe cherry plums, dry white wine and a handful of fresh herbs; it appears at Easter and stays on menus until the plums ripen. Shkmeruli, from the village of Shkmeri in Racha, is fried chicken finished in garlic and milk and served bubbling in its clay ketsi. Satsivi is poultry, usually turkey or chicken, served cold in a thick walnut sauce spiced with fenugreek, coriander and cinnamon, the centrepiece of the New Year table. Kharcho is a beef soup thickened with rice and soured with cherry plum, seasoned with the khmeli suneli spice mix and coriander; in Samegrelo it becomes a walnut stew served over ghomi. Kupati are coarse pork sausages from Samegrelo and Guria, chicken tabaka is a whole flattened chicken, fried and served with ajika, and khashlama is plain boiled beef or lamb, with khashi, the boiled-meat broth, the Kakhetian cure after a supra.

Ten regional kitchens

Georgian cuisine is a dozen regional cuisines that share a border, and the best versions of many dishes never reach Tbilisi menus intact. Use this table to know what to order where you are.

Bread, cheese and sauces

Bread comes from the tone, the round clay oven a baker leans into to slap dough onto its walls; the long, canoe-shaped shotis puri and the flatter tonis puri come out minutes later and are sold through a window for a lari or two. Mchadi is the cornbread of the west, eaten with lobio and cheese. Cheese is mostly two kinds: sulguni, the brined, elastic cheese of Samegrelo made from cow or buffalo milk, eaten fresh, smoked or fried, and Imeruli, the softer white cheese that fills most khachapuri. In the mountains you meet guda, a sheep's cheese from Tusheti that takes twenty days to make, and in Meskheti tenili, hand-pulled into threads.

Sweets

Georgian meals do not end with dessert, and restaurant dessert menus are short and often imported. The sweets are seasonal and come from the market. Churchkhela is the one you will see everywhere: walnuts or hazelnuts threaded on a string, dipped in tatara, grape must thickened with flour, and hung to dry into a candle shape; the Kakhetian method went onto the national heritage list in 2015, and it is made after the harvest and eaten at New Year and Christmas. Pelamushi is the same thickened grape juice set as a jelly and served with nuts, an autumn dish. Gozinaki is walnuts caramelised in honey, cut into diamonds for New Year. Tklapi, the fruit leather, is the snack children take to school. Buy churchkhela from a market or a Kakheti roadside rather than a souvenir stall, and press it: a fresh one bends, a stale one is stone.

Drinks

Wine first, because this is where it began: pottery from Gadachrili Gora south of Tbilisi carries wine residue from about 6000 BC, and much of the wine you drink at a family table still ferments in a buried clay qvevri. Order the dry amber whites made on their skins with the walnut dishes and a Saperavi red with the meat; at traditional restaurants house wine comes in a jug from a small producer from about 5 GEL a glass, and the Tbilisi wine bars pour from 6 to 15 GEL. Our wine culture guide explains the grapes and the qvevri. Chacha is what is left when the wine is made, the grape pomace distilled into a clear spirit: 40 percent in the commercial bottles, anything up to 85 percent from a home still, and it appears at the end of a supra or at a guesthouse breakfast. One is polite; our chacha guide has the rest.

The soft drink is lemonade, limonati, which here means a sweet carbonated drink in flavours rather than lemon: tarragon (tarkhuna, bright green) is the classic, and pear and cream are on every shelf. Mineral water is a national habit: Borjomi, from the spa town of the same name, is salty and strongly carbonated, and the spring in the town runs warm and faintly sulphurous, nothing like the bottle; Nabeghlavi is the other name on every menu. Georgian beer exists and is fine with khinkali, but if you only drink beer here you have missed the point of the country.

How restaurants work

What it costs

At the National Bank's rate on 29 September 2026 (2.61 GEL to the dollar, 2.96 to the euro), 20 GEL is about $8 or 7 euros. Food is the part of a Georgian trip that costs least and delivers most; the top tables in Tbilisi are what a mid-range dinner costs in western Europe, and the canteens and bakeries have barely moved in years. Our travel budget guide puts the meals into a week.

Where to eat it

In Tbilisi the choice is deep. Shemomechama in Vera and Salobie Bia on Rustaveli do the whole classic menu well; Klike's and Amo Rame are the khinkali rooms; Mapshalia on Aghmashenebeli Avenue is the Megrelian canteen, Ghebi a few doors along the Rachan one, open around the clock; Retro is where the city goes for Adjaruli; Barbarestan cooks from a 19th-century cookbook and Cafe Littera in the Writers' House garden is the one dinner to book days ahead. For the cheapest and freshest food, eat at the Dezerter Bazaar by Station Square (daily 07:00 to 17:00, cash only, best before noon), where the cheese, churchkhela and bakery stalls make a lunch for a few lari. Our restaurants guide has addresses and hours for forty kitchens, and the street food guide covers the bakery windows.

Outside the capital, eat the region you are in. Kutaisi's Green Bazaar is the place for Imeretian cheese and lobiani hot from the bakeries around its edge; Telavi's covered bazaar in the morning has the Kakhetian cheese, churchkhela and walnuts; Batumi is where the Adjaruli was invented and where to eat it; Mestia is the only place to eat a kubdari made by a Svan; and Pasanauri, twenty minutes north of Ananuri on the Military Highway, is where half of Georgia stops for khinkali on the way to Kazbegi. A family guesthouse dinner in any of these places is 20 to 30 GEL a head and usually the best meal of the trip.

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