Walking down the cobblestone alleys of Tbilisi’s Old Town, you’ll notice a word on restaurant signs that doesn’t exist in most languages. Supra and Modi are the two different terms Georgian chefs use for their food. The first refers to dishes made the same way for centuries. The second means those same traditions re-read with modern ingredients and techniques. Over the past decade, the number of chefs in Tbilisi working in both registers has grown visibly.
This piece steps into the world of Georgian chefs reinventing tradition. Who they are, how they work, why they rewrite Georgian food, and what that means for travelers. The same shift has been covered in BBC Travel’s food culture series and is documented in detail on the Georgian cuisine Wikipedia page.
Why Georgian chefs began rewriting tradition
From the mid-2010s, the standing of Georgian food shifted. The 2013 inscription of the Qvevri winemaking method on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List marked the beginning of broader international attention to Georgian wine and foodways. Georgia is one of the world’s oldest winemaking regions, with roughly 8,000 years of continuous tradition. Source: UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List
Around the same period, a wave of Georgian chefs returned to Tbilisi after working in London, Paris, and New York. They came back carrying external palates and the same desire not to lose the flavors from their grandmothers’ kitchens. The result is the cuisine they call Modi.
- Rediscovering tradition: bringing regional recipes on the verge of disappearing back into cities
- Modernizing technique: applying low-temperature cooking, fermentation, and contemporary plating to local ingredients
- Widening access: drawing younger diners through a pop-up culture called cartou
Chefs and restaurants worth knowing in Tbilisi
Old Town and the Sololaki district concentrate the densest cluster of restaurants working in this register. What they share is a simple rule: the chef buys ingredients at the market, and the menu changes with what arrived that morning.
1) Keto Karkia’s Restaurant
Tekuna Gachechiladze is one of the most recognized female chefs in Georgia. She runs a small Tbilisi-based restaurant group that reinterprets Kartli-region home cooking with contemporary plating. She often cites a principle: a Georgian table should always carry five colors.
2) Shavi Lomi (Black Lion)
This restaurant sits on a quiet Sololaki side street, run by a chef who started as a brewer. Since opening around 2010, it has rebuilt core Georgian home dishes such as lobio (bean stew) and chikhirtma (chicken soup) with modern technique. The building itself dates from the late 19th century, and the original brick ceilings and wooden columns are still in place.
3) Barbarestan
This restaurant takes a 1904 cookbook by Barbare Eristavi-Jordanidze as its primary source. The chef follows the 19th-century home recipes as written, then refines plating and wine pairing for a 21st-century room. The effect is a slice of Georgian domestic food history most diners have never read.
Beyond these, Tbilisi holds a wider scene: the small café inside the Gabriadze Marionette Theatre, the restaurant at Stamba Hotel, and Zakaria Restaurant are all part of the same conversation. Source: Georgian National Tourism Administration, visitgeorgia.ge
Three ways to reinterpret tradition
Younger Georgian chefs approach tradition in three broad ways.
- Keep the ingredients, modernize the technique: red beans, pine nuts, and walnuts stay central in lobio, but cooking time and temperature are tuned. A 12-hour low-temperature cook, for example, preserves the bean starch in a different way.
- Keep the technique, reinterpret the ingredients: a traditional cucumber-walnut-garlic salad (chashush) gains sweetness and color with the addition of beetroot or fresh figs.
- Reinterpret both: a boat-shaped Adjarian khachapuri gets a deeper flavor profile by mixing traditional Imeruli and Sulguni cheeses rather than the usual mozzarella.
All three share one rule. The first bite has to confirm, without question, “this is Georgian food.” Only after that confirmation does a modern element earn its place on the plate.
Practical guide for travelers
A few practical notes for anyone planning to eat through this scene in Georgia.
- Reservations matter even on weekdays: the most talked-about places in Tbilisi fill up a week ahead on weekends, and weekday tables after 8 pm local time are the busiest.
- Average per-person budget: at a modern Georgian restaurant, a main course, a glass of wine, and a starter run about 60-80 GEL per person. At an exchange rate of roughly 1 GEL ≈ 0.37 USD, that is approximately 22-30 USD. Source: National Bank of Georgia (NBG) official rate, May 2026
- Reading the menu: Georgian-language menus are the default. Memorize khachapuri (cheese bread), khinkali (dumpling), badrijani (eggplant dish), and tskharishveli (truffle).
- Tipping: service is not included by default. Adding 10% for good service is the local norm.
- Vegetarian options: Georgian food is surprisingly vegetarian-friendly. Most restaurants offer badrijani nigvzit (eggplant rolls), lobio (bean stew), and pkhali (spinach or beet pâté) as standard vegetarian plates.
A walking food route through Tbilisi
One day is enough to cover Old Town and Sololaki on foot with four or five stops. Start with lunch at Barbarestan on Leselidze Street, then buy churchkhela (walnut candy) from Dunneli and eat it on a bench. In the afternoon, walk to Shavi Lomi in Sololaki for a glass of chacha (grape distillate) and a small plate.
This roughly 30-minute walk between Old Town and Sololaki is the most efficient way to taste past and present Georgian food at the same time. Leave time to sit on the cobblestones and drink wine slowly. Georgians call this სუფრა (supra), a table gathering, and the conversation around the table is as much a part of the trip as the food.
What “reinterpreting tradition” actually means
One last point worth making clearly. When these chefs reinterpret tradition, it is not a fashion for novelty. Georgia was part of the Soviet Union from 1921 to 1991, and during that 70-year period, regional recipes and home-cooking knowledge were partly lost. Since independence, the country has run a national project to recover that heritage, a story covered in the Wikipedia entry on the culture of Georgia.
Within that project, modern Georgian restaurants do two things at once. They record and preserve disappearing home recipes at city-restaurant scale, and they rewrite those recipes in a form that reaches a 21st-century diner. A traveler sitting down for one meal becomes part of that preservation project.
When you sit down for a meal in Tbilisi, it is worth thinking for a moment about the chef behind the plate and the decisions that put it there. Food is the most edible way to read a country’s history.
Sources: UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List; Georgian National Tourism Administration (visitgeorgia.ge); National Bank of Georgia (NBG) exchange rate publication
If you are planning a Georgia trip, build the food schedule into the itinerary early. The restaurants above are owner-operated, and a quick email to each one often returns a recommended tasting route tailored to your schedule and taste. For reservations, contact the restaurants directly through their official websites or email.
