What to eat in Georgia, and how a supra works

Here is what to order, where the regional differences actually are, what the wine is doing, and how a supra works so that you are not the person who eats everything in the first half hour.

The dishes to know

Khachapuri. Cheese bread, and the national dish, and it is not one thing. The Imeretian version is a flat round loaf with cheese sealed inside, and it is the everyday one. The Adjarian version is an open boat with a raw egg and butter dropped into molten cheese at the table, which you stir in and then tear the crust off to dip. It is enormous and it is a meal, not a starter, and ordering one each is the most common mistake visitors make. The Megrelian version has cheese inside and more cheese melted on top. Penovani is the flaky pastry version sold at street windows for a dollar and a half.

Khinkali. Soup dumplings, twisted at the top, filled with spiced minced meat and broth, or with mushrooms, cheese or potato. You hold the knot, bite a small hole, drink the broth, eat the rest, and leave the knot on the plate. Georgians count the knots. Five is a light lunch, eight is a real one. They are ordered in multiples and they arrive when they arrive.

Pkhali. Vegetable pastes bound with ground walnut, garlic and herbs, made from spinach, beetroot, aubergine, leek or nettle, and served as cool coloured mounds with pomegranate seeds on top. The best single argument that Georgian food is not a meat cuisine.

Badrijani nigvzit. Fried aubergine slices rolled around walnut paste. On every table, and rightly.

Lobio. Red bean stew, cooked with coriander and served in a clay pot, usually with mchadi, a dense corn bread, and pickles. Cheap, filling, and the thing to order when you have eaten too much cheese for three days.

Mtsvadi. Meat, usually pork, grilled over vine cuttings and served with raw onion and pomegranate. In Kakheti during the harvest the vine cuttings are that year’s prunings and it makes a real difference.

Chakhokhbili and chakapuli. Two stews. The first is chicken with tomato and herbs, the second is lamb with tarragon, green plums and white wine, and it is one of the great dishes of the region. Chakapuli is spring food, best in April and May.

Ajika and tkemali. The two condiments to know. Ajika is a hot red pepper and herb paste, tkemali is a sour plum sauce that goes with everything fried.

Churchkhela. Walnuts threaded on a string and dipped repeatedly in thickened grape juice, hung in ropes at every market. Good when fresh from Kakheti in the autumn, dry and dusty when it has hung in a souvenir shop since March.

Shoti. The canoe-shaped white bread slapped onto the wall of a clay tone oven and pulled out with a hook. Worth stopping at a bakery to watch, and worth eating within twenty minutes of it coming out.

Wine, and what qvevri actually means

Georgia has been making wine in buried clay vessels for around eight thousand years, which is as far back as the archaeological record goes anywhere, and the qvevri method is on the UNESCO intangible heritage list.

The method, briefly. A qvevri is a large egg-shaped clay vessel buried to the neck in the floor of a marani, the cellar room. Grapes go in, often with skins, stems and pips, and ferment on their own yeasts. The vessel is sealed and left through winter. The buried shape keeps the temperature stable and the sediment settles into the point at the bottom. Nothing is added, nothing is filtered, and the wine is racked off in spring.

What this produces is two things. Saperavi, the black-skinned red grape, makes a deep, firm, high-acid wine that behaves like a serious red anywhere in the world and that almost everyone likes on first taste. And Rkatsiteli, Kisi and Mtsvane, white grapes fermented on their skins, make amber wine: tannic, oxidative, orange in the glass, and closer to a light red than to a white in how it sits at the table.

Be warned honestly. Amber wine is not universally likeable. Some of our travellers fall for it completely and ship cases home. Others find it dry, grippy and strange. Find out which you are on the first evening in a Tbilisi wine bar, before you commit a week of your trip to cellars.

The large commercial producers are ordinary. The family cellars are the point. A tasting in a marani where the person pouring made the wine, in the room it was made in, costs $10 to $20 with bread and cheese, and it is the best value experience in the country. Our wine and food route is ten days of exactly that.

Chacha, the grape spirit distilled from the pressings, will be offered. One is hospitality. Three is a lost afternoon.

How a supra actually works

The supra is the Georgian feast and it is a structure rather than a dinner.

A tamada, the toastmaster, runs the table. Toasts follow an order that varies by region and by family but usually runs something like this: peace, the reason we are gathered, the dead and the ancestors, parents, children, women, the guests, the homeland, and a final toast to the family of the house. Each toast is a short speech, sometimes several minutes long, and there is often an alaverdi, where the tamada passes the floor to someone else to continue the same theme.

Five practical things.

1. You drink at the toast, not between toasts. Sipping your wine steadily through the meal reads as slightly odd, and it also gets you drunk faster than the Georgian rhythm does.
2. You will be asked to speak. As the guest, a toast will come to you. Short is fine. Thanking the house and the people at the table is the entire required content.
3. The table fills up, it does not clear. Dishes arrive on top of dishes, cold ones first and staying there, hot ones landing on top. Clearing your plate is not the objective and nobody is counting.
4. Pace yourself against the bread. The first half hour looks like the whole meal. It is roughly a third of it.
5. Wine only. Toasting with beer is considered wrong at a supra, and toasting with chacha is a decision about your evening.

Being at a supra in a private house is the single best evening most of our travellers have in Georgia. It is also not something you can book. Our Tbilisi partner arranges them in Kakheti and in the mountain villages, with families they have known for years, and that is the one part of Georgian eating that genuinely requires somebody on the ground. GO EAST staffs its own offices in Japan, Vietnam, India and the Philippines, and Georgia runs through that Tbilisi partner rather than an office of our own.

Where to eat, by place

Tbilisi. The most interesting restaurant city in the Caucasus and it has changed enormously in a decade. Three categories are worth your evenings: the modern Georgian kitchens that are reworking the canon with proper technique, the old-style cellar restaurants where the recipe has not moved in fifty years, and the wine bars, which are where you learn the fastest. Do not eat in the Rustaveli tourist strip. Walk ten minutes into Sololaki or Vera and the price halves and the food improves.

Kakheti. Home cooking at guesthouse tables, and this is where the best meals are. Telavi and Sighnaghi both have proper restaurants, but the food to seek out is at the marani, cooked by the family.

Imereti and Kutaisi. Less meat, more herbs and walnut, the Imeretian khachapuri, and the sour and spicy end of the repertoire. The Kutaisi market on a weekday morning is one of the best food markets in the region.

Adjara and the coast. The Adjarian khachapuri boat where it belongs, plus borano and sinori from the mountain villages inland. Inland Adjara eats better than Batumi.

The high mountains. Svaneti has kubdari, a bread stuffed with spiced meat, and tashmijabi, potato mashed with molten cheese. Tusheti has guda, sheep cheese aged in a skin, and it is strong.

What is overrated

• Restaurant churchkhela and souvenir wine. Buy both in Kakheti, from the producer, in the autumn.
• The Rustaveli Avenue restaurants with photographs on the menu and a person outside inviting you in.
• Wine tours to the three big commercial estates. The buildings are impressive, the wine is fine, and you learn less in three hours than in forty minutes in a family cellar. One commercial estate for contrast is enough, and we cover the argument in what we would skip in Georgia.
• Ordering one Adjarian khachapuri each. Order one between two, at most.

Plan this trip

Tell us how much of your Georgia trip you want built around the table, and a specialist will put the right cellars, the right markets and one supra in a private house into your outline. Free, and with no obligation.

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Keep reading

• Georgia: the complete guide to planning your trip
• Tbilisi in three days
• Georgia for the first time
• What we would skip in Georgia
• Georgia wine and food, 10 days
• All our Georgia trips

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