What to eat in Azerbaijan, and how the tea works

It is also, consistently, the biggest positive surprise of the trip. People arrive with no expectations of the food and leave asking us where to find piti at home.

Here is what to order, where to order it, and the honest note about what is overrated.

The dishes to order first

Qutab. A thin folded flatbread cooked on a hot plate, filled with greens, pumpkin, cheese or minced meat, served with sumac and yoghurt. It costs $2 to $4 from a street counter, it is the best cheap food in the country, and it is what we tell people to eat on the first morning while they work out what everything else is.

Piti. Order this in Sheki and nowhere else if you can help it. Mutton, chickpeas, chestnuts and fat baked slowly in a sealed clay pot, served as two courses from the same vessel: first the broth poured over torn bread, then the solids mashed with sumac and onion. It is a whole lunch and it takes an hour. Around $5 to $8.

Dushbara. A soup of very small dumplings, sometimes small enough that a proper cook is judged on how many fit on a spoon, in a clear broth with vinegar and dried mint. The most comforting thing in the country and a good order on a cold day in the north.

Plov. Not one dish but a family of them, and different from the Uzbek version most travellers meet first. Here the rice and the topping are often cooked separately and brought together at the table, with a crust of dough or flatbread at the bottom of the pot called gazmag. Shah plov, baked inside a bread casing and cut open at the table, is the celebration version and worth ordering once for two people or more.

Dolma. Covers far more than grape leaves: aubergine, pepper and quince are all stuffed and cooked the same way. Ordering a mixed plate is the efficient way to try three at once.

Lavangi. The best dish in Azerbaijani cooking, in our view, and it belongs to the south. Walnut, onion, sour plum paste and herbs packed into a chicken or a Caspian fish and baked. It is a reason to build Lankaran and the Talysh into a longer trip.

Kebabs and saj. Lamb and chicken over charcoal is everywhere and reliably good. Saj is a communal dish cooked on a domed metal plate at the table, with meat, potato, tomato and aubergine, and it is a good order for four people who cannot agree.

Badimjan and the salad culture. Aubergine appears grilled, stuffed, smoked and in cold walnut sauces. The chopped tomato and cucumber salad that arrives unasked is fresher here than the same salad anywhere west of it.

Sheki halva. Not the sesame paste halva you may be expecting. This is layered rice-flour noodle pastry with hazelnuts, soaked in saffron syrup, cut in diamonds and sold from open trays in Sheki. Buy one piece, discover it is enough for three people, buy more anyway.

Where to eat it

Baku. The best restaurant scene in the Caucasus after Tbilisi, and a broader one than most visitors expect: serious modern Azerbaijani cooking, good Georgian and Turkish restaurants, and old-fashioned places doing one dish properly. Dinner in a good restaurant runs $20 to $35 a head and a tasting menu at the top of the market is $60 to $100. Eat in the streets around and behind Fountain Square rather than on the tourist frontage, and away from the boulevard. Baku in three days has the districts.

Sheki. The best table in the country and the reason we defend two nights there. Piti, halva, and the local habit of eating in a walled garden. This is where our food and culture route spends its longest stretch.

Lahic. Small and simple. Two or three family places, home cooking, and dinner in the guesthouse is usually better than dinner out.

Quba and the north. Orchard country, so the fruit, the walnut sauces and the preserves are the point. The jams here are what ends up on your tea tray for the rest of the trip.

Lankaran and the Talysh. Lavangi, citrus, tea grown on the hillsides, and a subtropical larder that belongs to a different country from the semi-desert two hours north.

Ismayilli and Shamakhi. Wine estates with kitchens attached, and the best lunch stop on the road between Baku and Sheki.

How the tea works

Tea is not a drink here, it is the structure of the day, and understanding it is worth more than any restaurant recommendation.

Black tea arrives in an armudu, a small pear-shaped glass, on a tray with a bowl of jam and often nuts, dried fruit and hard sugar. The jam is eaten from the spoon alongside the tea, not stirred into it. Cherry, white cherry, fig, walnut and quince are the common ones, and the walnut jam is the one worth crossing a room for.

A chaykhana is a tea house and, in the provinces, is usually full of men playing nard, which is backgammon. Visitors are welcome. Nobody is in a hurry. A pot with jam is $2 to $4 and buys you as long as you want the table.

Two practical notes. Tea is offered constantly, in shops, workshops and guesthouses, and refusing the first glass is fine while refusing the second is a small social cost. And the tea itself is often grown in Lankaran, which is a nice thing to know when you finally get there.

Wine, quietly improving

Azerbaijan makes wine, and it is better than it was five years ago. The estates around Ismayilli and Shamakhi have modern equipment and outside expertise, and the reds made from Madrasa, a local grape, are the ones to ask for. Expect $12 to $22 for a bottle in a restaurant and $8 to $15 at the cellar.

Nobody should come to Azerbaijan primarily for the wine. Everybody should drink some while they are here, and a tasting on the Baku to Sheki road costs you no extra driving because the estates sit directly on the route.

Alcohol is served openly. Azerbaijan is a secular state with a majority Muslim population and a functioning domestic wine and beer industry, and this is not a country where you have to think about where to find a glass.

What is overrated

Hotel restaurants in Baku. The city has a good independent scene at a third of the price. There is no reason to eat in your hotel.

The folklore dinner. Several places in Baku pair a national menu with a music and dance show. The food is average, the room is loud, and the version of the culture on offer is a performance. If you want music, our Baku partner can point you at a place where musicians play for the room rather than for the coach party.

Caviar. Baku’s reputation for Caspian caviar is largely historical. What is sold to visitors is expensive, of uneven provenance, and comes with legal complications when you try to take it home. We do not build it in and we would rather spend the money on a lunch in Sheki.

Anywhere with photographs on the menu and someone outside inviting you in. The same rule as everywhere. Walk two streets back.

Ordering a whole plov each. It is a shared dish. Two plates for four people plus a salad and a soup is a better meal than four plates.

More of this is in what we would skip in Azerbaijan.

What a day of eating actually costs

• Qutab and tea for breakfast: $4 to $6
• Piti lunch in Sheki: $5 to $8
• Lunch in a provincial restaurant, dishes shared: $8 to $14 a head
• Dinner in a good Baku restaurant: $20 to $35 a head
• A pot of tea with jam in a chaykhana: $2 to $4

A realistic daily food budget for someone eating well and eating widely is $25 to $40. What a trip to Azerbaijan really costs puts that inside the whole budget.

How we build the eating into a trip

We book family kitchens and village tables rather than hotel restaurants, and where a house cooks better than any restaurant in the town, which is the case in Lahic and in the northern villages, we arrange dinner in the house. Our Baku partner does that booking, because it works by relationship and telephone rather than online. GO EAST staffs its own offices in Japan, Vietnam, India and the Philippines, and Azerbaijan runs through that Baku partner, which we would rather say plainly than imply otherwise.

Plan this trip

Tell us how much of the trip you want built around the table and an Azerbaijan specialist will put the right kitchens, markets and family houses into your route. Free first outline, no obligation.

Start planning

Keep reading

• Azerbaijan: the complete guide to planning your trip
• Azerbaijan for the first time
• What a trip to Azerbaijan really costs
• What we would skip in Azerbaijan
• Food and culture, 9 days
• All our Azerbaijan trips

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