Georgian cuisine — not from the state but from the small Eurasian country that used to be part of the Soviet Union — is starting to trend in the United States.
It’s still very early in the cycle — so early that our sister research company, Technomic, doesn’t track the cuisine yet — but it’s happening. More than a dozen Georgian restaurants have opened over the past year in trend-forward cities, particularly New York, but also Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, and the Chicago suburbs.
The cuisine is difficult to classify. Georgia’s an ancient country with wine culture documented as far back as 8,000 years ago. Though small, with fewer than four million people, it has a wide variety of regional culinary differences due to varied climates stretching from the shores of the Black Sea in the west to the mountainous areas of the interior.
It’s also challenged by a language that seems inscrutable to outsiders, with dishes like pkhali, mchadi, shkmeruli, and mtsvadi that, unfortunately, are pronounced the way they’re spelled.
“Say it however you can say it,” said Lika Arce, owner and creative director of Chito Gvrito, a Georgian restaurant that opened near Union Square in New York City right before the onset of the pandemic in 2020. “We have a rule here: Do not correct the guest. I struggle with French words when I go to French restaurants.”
So how should people pronounce Chito Gvrito?
“Just call it Gito.”
And the cuisine has a lot going for it, from charismatic dishes with broad appeal to beverages poised for discovery — even a traditional version of dirty soda — to gluten-free and vegan dishes.
Khachapuri
If you’ve seen the boat-shaped bread bowls filled with cheese and an egg yolk on social media, you’ve seen Adjaruli khachapuri. It’s filled with fine molten cheese curds, a generous stick of butter, and an egg yolk and traditionally mixed tableside. It’s a communal dish eaten by hand, gradually pulling the bread bowl apart and dipping it in the gooey center. It’s fun, interactive, and has a lovely story behind it.
Nino Chiokadze, executive chef of Chama Mama, a Georgian restaurant and bakery in New York with five locations, including two that opened earlier this year, said Adjaruli Khachapuri comes from Adjara province on the Black Sea coast, and is meant as a token of good luck for sailors. That’s why the bread is shaped like a boat, and the egg in the middle represents the sun, and therefore fair weather.
But it’s not common in the rest of Georgia.
“If I want the best Adjaruli Khachapuri, I go to Adjara, and then I’m good for a year,” she said.
But there are dozens of different khachapuri, a name that combines khacho, or cheese curds, and puri, which is bread. The most popular are Imeruli khachapuri, which is a pizza-like flatbread stuffed with khacho, and Megruli khachapuri, which is similar but has melted cheese on top — usually something fresh, similar to mozzarella.
Imeruli khachapuri | Photo courtesy of Chama Mama
Chama Mama also offers seasonal ones. The current one is Megruli topped with opal basil and tarragon, but she’s working on one for the fall with toasted pumpkin seeds and a smoky oil. Last Christmas she made one shaped like a wreath and garnished with pomegranate seeds.
Sometimes she also offers Penovani khachapuri, made with puff pastry instead of flatbread.
“It’s very city-style,” she said, referring to Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi.
Chito Gvrito’s signature khachapuri is “sort of Megrulian,” Arce said, but topped with a Georgian type of pesto made with walnuts, cilantro, parsley, basil, garlic, and olive oil.
Khinkali
“I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like khinkali or khachapuri,” said Soso Bokuchava, who opened Rtveli in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay this past spring.
The area is home to many immigrants from the former Soviet Union, where Georgian food is widespread and popular — Bokuchava agreed that its reputation is similar to Mexican food in the United States.
Sheepshead Bay and surrounding areas are dotted with Georgian restaurants, mostly small shops or takeout bakeries catering to locals, but Bokuchava has combined what he calls Georgians’ “genetic” penchant for hospitality with his own training at Cipriani, known for its impeccable service, to create a white-tablecloth restaurant with English-speaking servers and bartenders wearing ties, and a cook who specializes in khinkali.
“People call them dumplings, and I say ‘No, they’re khinkali,’” Chiokadze of Chama Mama said.
But they’re dumplings. In fact, they’re soup dumplings, although they’re eaten differently from the Chinese variety. Originally from the mountains, khinkali were traditionally filled with meat flavored with onions and spiced with wild caraway and often chile pepper. Water is carefully incorporated into the filling so it doesn’t leak out while the dumplings are made, but provides a tasty broth once the khinkali are cooked.
The dough is wrapped around the filling and gathered together into a topknot — the more folds the better, according to custom. That knot isn’t eaten, but used as a handle. The khinkali are inverted, a small bite is taken out of the side, the soup is slurped out, and then the dumpling itself is eaten, except for the knot, which is just a clump of undercooked dough.
“It’s really not easy,” said Chiokadze, who also has a khinkali specialist in each restaurant.
The dough has to be tough enough to withstand boiling for around ten minutes to cook the meat inside.
Although traditionally made with meat and onions, Chiokadze explained that kalakuri khinkali, popular in Tbilisi, has lots of herbs, particularly cilantro, parsley, and mint, as well as meat. Other less traditional varieties are filled with cheese, mushrooms and potatoes, or vegetables. They are traditionally eaten with aggressive shakes of black pepper.
Lamb khinkali | Photo courtesy of Chama Mama
Khinkali are surrounded by tradition. They’re prized as hangover food, there’s a traditional celebratory gathering called a khinklaoba, when people simply gather to eat khinkali, usually paired with beer and a local grappa variant called chacha, and they’re the object of eating competitions, particularly among young men.
“Yesterday we had three Uzbek guests and they ate 100 khinkali — correction, 99 khinkali,” Bokuchava said: They ordered 100, but they were familiar enough with Georgian tradition to know that eating the last one was bad luck.
Pkhali and other vegan foods
No one will get mad if you just call them khali. These are a category of vegetable spreads made with whatever’s in season — frequently leeks, beets, or spinach — that are mixed with a garlic-walnut paste and paired with a dense cornbread called mchadi. They’re usually smooth and relatively mild, although Arce has noticed a tendency of some Georgian restaurants in the United States to lean too heavily on spices.
Pkhali are among the most prominent vegan options in Georgian cooking, along with beans, which are a staple in the diet. Lobiani are khachapuri variants filled with spiced bean paste instead of cheese, and Arce said seasoned beans are also a popular cold appetizer. They’re served along with other dishes at the beginning of family gatherings — like mezze in the Middle East or cheese and crackers in the U.S. Arce, noticing that beans served whole and cold are difficult for many of her customers to grasp, purées them into a hummus variation and tops it with a spicy sauce called ajika. She also serves a pkhali variation made with roasted red peppers and walnuts.
Stuffed eggplant at Chito Gvrito | Photo courtesy of Chito Gvrito
Sauces and dips
The spicy ajika is probably the most widely used sauce in Georgia, but there are other variations that can range from watery condiments to thick pastes to spread on khachapuri or mchadi.
Chiokadze serves a Kelekhi ajika, usually reserved for memorial supras, or traditional feasts with many toasts and a lot of ceremony. It’s made with roasted onions, wine vinegar, walnuts and lots of herbs — particularly the classic Georgian trio of parsley, cilantro, and wild mint.
“It’s great with meat, fish, and breads,” she said. “And I love it so much I want people to enjoy it when they’re not at sad supras. It’s tangy and refreshing.”
An ajika from the coastal province of Guria — where hazelnuts reign instead of walnuts — is made with hazelnuts, garlic, and the usual herbs. Green versions of ajika also use those herbs blended with garlic.
Another popular sauce is tkemali, made green with sour plums or red with ripe plums and seasoned with chile, dill, cilantro, mint, blue fenugreek, and other herbs and used as a condiment for roast meats.
Lagidze water
The Lagidze family developed a line of natural syrups in the 19th century that have been added to sparkling water and enjoyed as the Georgian version of Italian sodas (themselves just sparkling water and syrup) ever since — or, arguably, dirty sodas, since a popular combination is chocolate syrup and a syrup derived from cream. Other popular syrups include pear, tarragon (tarragon soda is widely available commercially in Georgia, as well as in South Brooklyn and Georgian restaurants in the U.S.), and lemon.
Bokuchava ran with that at Rtveli and introduced his own take on lemonade, adding syrups to them.
“I invented parsley lemonade,” he said, although passion fruit is available too, as well as strawberry, because this is America after all.
And the rest
There’s a lot more to explore when it comes to Georgian food, from sausages called kupati, kebabs called mtsvadi, the chicken-and-garlic dish shkmeruli, to chakapuli, a springtime lamb-and-tarragon stew.
And now that Georgian cuisine has a foothold in the trend-forward cities of the United States, you can expect more adaptations to follow.