The food

Khinkali, and how to eat them

Khinkali are soup dumplings, twisted shut at the top into a knot. They arrive very hot and full of broth, and there is a correct way to handle them: pick one up by the knot with your fingers, bite a small hole in the side, drink the broth, then eat the rest and leave the knot on your plate. The pile of knots is how the kitchen counts what you ate. Using a fork is not illegal, only conspicuous.

Bread and cheese

Khachapuri is bread and cheese, and every region makes its own. The one people photograph is Adjaruli, from Adjara — the region Batumi sits in — shaped like a boat with an egg yolk and a knob of butter dropped into the middle to be stirred through the hot cheese. Imeruli is a flat round loaf with the cheese inside, Megruli the same with more cheese melted on top. Bread itself is usually shoti, slapped onto the wall of a clay tone oven and pulled out blistered.

The rest of the table

Georgian cooking leans on walnuts, herbs and sour notes rather than chilli heat, and centuries of Orthodox fasting have left it with an unusually good vegan repertoire — pkhali, lobio, aubergine with walnut paste. Grilled meat is mtsvadi, cooked over vine cuttings. To drink there is tarragon lemonade, and Borjomi, the salty mineral water from the town of the same name that Georgians treat as a cure for everything.

Pork appears on plenty of menus, particularly in mtsvadi, and lamb and beef are just as common; several halal restaurants operate in central Tbilisi.