Adjaran cuisine: the coastal table of Georgia's Black Sea region

Where the Caucasus meets the sea

Adjara sits at a meeting point of civilisations. Its Black Sea coast — centred on Batumi, Georgia’s second largest city — has been Colchian, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Russian, and Soviet in turn. Its mountain interior, rising to over 2,500 metres in the alpine highlands around Khulo and Shuakhevi, has sheltered a Georgian Orthodox and Sunni Muslim population in an arrangement that reflects the region’s complex religious history.

This layering of influences produces one of Georgia’s most culturally distinctive regions, and one of its most interesting food traditions. Adjaran cuisine is simultaneously deeply Georgian — khachapuri, walnut sauces, fresh herbs, the supra tradition — and shaped by four centuries of Ottoman cultural presence in ways that are visible in its dairy products, its sweets, and its approach to bread.

The Black Sea is not incidental to the cooking. Adjara has access to seafood that is simply unavailable inland: fresh mullet, sea bass, anchovy, and the Phaseolus (Black Sea variant of common beans) that grows particularly well in the humid coastal climate. The mountains supply dairy products of extraordinary quality — the cows grazing high alpine pastures in summer produce milk with a fat content and flavour that lowland farms cannot match.

Understanding Adjaran food means holding both these truths simultaneously: this is Georgian food, and it is something else as well. The tension between those two things is what makes it worth exploring.

Adjaran khachapuri: the iconic boat

The Adjaruli khachapuri is Georgia’s most internationally recognised food item — the dish that appears in travel magazines, on Instagram, and in the dream sequences of anyone who has eaten it once. A boat-shaped casing of golden bread dough, filled with melted sulguni cheese, with a raw egg cracked into the centre in the final minutes of baking and a knob of butter added at the table. You eat it by tearing the pointed bread ends and dragging them through the molten cheese-egg-butter mixture, working inward as the filling is slowly depleted.

The description captures the mechanics; it does not capture the experience. The butter melts into the egg yolk as you watch; the cheese pulls in golden strings from the spoon; the bread crust has a slight chew and a yeasty richness that is the proper vehicle for what it carries. A properly made Adjaruli is one of the most immediately pleasurable things to eat anywhere in Georgia.

The important qualification is “properly made.” The Adjaruli served in Tbilisi restaurants is usually good; occasionally it is excellent. The Adjaruli made in Adjara — particularly in the family restaurants of the mountain villages — is genuinely different: the bread is from a wood-fired tone oven, the sulguni is fresh and local, the egg is from a village chicken, the butter is the region’s own product. The gap between these two experiences is real and significant.

In Batumi itself, the best Adjaruli is not on the tourist strip but in the older parts of the city and in the mountain resorts above the coast. For context on the broader khachapuri family, see our khachapuri guide.

Kaymaghi: clotted cream from alpine milk

Kaymaghi is Adjara’s great dairy luxury — clotted cream made from the full-fat milk of cows that graze Adjara’s high summer pastures. The technique is close to that used for clotted cream in Devon or kaymak in Turkey: fresh milk is heated very slowly for hours until the cream rises and sets into a thick, faintly yellowed layer that is skimmed and collected.

The result is extraordinarily rich — richer than butter in some respects, and with a complex, slightly nutty flavour that comes from the slow heating and the exceptional quality of the milk. Kaymaghi is eaten with bread as a morning food, spread like butter but more generously; it appears alongside honey as one of the most perfect simple breakfast combinations in the Caucasus; it is used in cooking as both a finishing fat and a cooking medium.

Finding kaymaghi in Batumi requires knowing where to look — the central market (bazaar) is the best starting point, where producers from the mountain villages bring their products on market days. In the mountain towns of Adjara — Khulo, Shuakhevi, Beshumi — kaymaghi is simply what you eat in the morning.

The comparison with Turkish kaymak is inevitable and accurate, reflecting the Ottoman period during which this dairy tradition was presumably reinforced, if not introduced. Adjara’s version is slightly thicker and more intensely flavoured than most kaymak you will find in Turkey, a consequence of the exceptional alpine pastures.

Borano: butter cheese from the mountains

Borano is a preparation unique to Adjaran mountain cuisine: a dish made by melting butter and cheese together in a clay pot over heat until they combine into a rich, golden, semi-liquid mixture that is eaten with bread like fondue, or served as a topping for cooked cornmeal.

The cheese used is typically fresh sulguni or a local variety of fresh mountain cheese; the butter is, ideally, from the same highland cattle as the kaymaghi. The combination is indulgent to the point of excess by almost any standard, and it is entirely the point. Borano is cold-mountain food — the kind of preparation that makes absolute physiological sense when you are working at altitude in winter and need calories in the most concentrated possible form.

Eaten in Adjara’s mountain villages in autumn or winter, with good bread and a glass of homemade wine, borano achieves a quality of straightforward rightness — the right food, in the right place, at the right time — that is the hallmark of a genuine regional dish as opposed to a culinary invention.

Black Sea fish: the catch on the coast

Adjara’s coastline gives it access to species unavailable anywhere else in Georgia, and the fish cooking of Batumi and the coastal villages reflects this with a directness that is itself a form of sophistication — when the fish is this fresh, complication is the enemy of pleasure.

Mullet (kefali) is the most important commercial species in the eastern Black Sea. The grey mullet available in Batumi’s market in late summer and autumn — silvery, firm-fleshed, with a mild flavour — is best treated simply: scaled and gutted, seasoned with Adjaran herbs, grilled over charcoal or in a clay pot in the oven. The flesh is rich enough to take strong accompaniment (tkemali, ajika) or delicate enough for nothing more than fresh herbs and lemon.

Anchovy (hamsi) is the working-class fish of the Black Sea and one of the great democratic food pleasures of the coast. In season (late autumn and winter, when the small anchovies school in vast numbers), they are eaten fried whole — head and all — with nothing more than salt and perhaps tkemali. The hamsi is the fish that Adjaran coastal families eat at home; it is also the fish that no restaurant can really improve upon.

Sea bass (levrek) and sea bream (çupra) appear in the better Batumi restaurants and are available at the fish market when the weather allows offshore fishing. Both species respond well to the Georgian approach of simple grilling with herbs.

The fish bazaar in Batumi — open in the morning on market days, with catches arriving by small boat — is one of the more atmospheric eating experiences available on Georgia’s coast. Buying directly from fishermen and having the fish cooked at a nearby restaurant is possible and recommended.

Bean cooking: the Adjaran tradition

Adjara is Georgia’s great bean-growing region — the humid coastal climate and the volcanic soil of the mountain valleys suit Phaseolus beans exceptionally well, and the region produces varieties (locally called lobio adjariuli) with particular flavour and thin skins that make them a pleasure to eat even when simply cooked.

Adjaran lobio tends to be richer and more fully cooked than Imeretian versions — the beans are cooked until very soft, with more fat (often kaymaghi or butter rather than vegetable oil) and a different spice profile that reflects the region’s Turkish influences. Adjaran bean dishes often include dried peppers and paprika alongside the coriander and fenugreek of the wider Georgian tradition.

Bean bread — lobiani — is made and eaten throughout Adjara as both a daily bread and a speciality dish. The Adjaran version sometimes incorporates locally smoked or spiced meat alongside the beans in the filling, producing something closer to a stuffed bread than the simpler versions found elsewhere.

Ottoman-influenced sweets: the pastry tradition

The most visible legacy of the Ottoman period in Adjaran food is in its sweet preparations — a pastry tradition that distinguishes Adjaran desserts from the rest of Georgia, which has a relatively modest sweet repertoire by comparison.

Pakhlava (baklava) — layered filo pastry with walnuts and honey syrup — appears at Adjaran celebrations and is sold by pastry shops in Batumi in forms closely resembling the Turkish and Levantine original. The Adjaran version uses the region’s local walnuts and local honey; some preparations add sulguni to the filling in a distinctly Georgian adaptation.

Churek — a sweet enriched bread made with butter, eggs, and sometimes sesame, baked for celebrations — reflects Ottoman bread traditions adapted to Georgian ingredients. It appears at Nowruz (spring new year, still observed culturally by some Adjaran families) and at major celebrations.

Kadaif and other shredded-pastry preparations also appear in Batumi’s pastry shops, alongside Georgian churchkhela (walnut-grape sausages) and pelamushi (grape jelly). The coexistence of these very different sweet traditions in a single city’s pastry shops is one of the more vivid expressions of Adjara’s hybrid cultural identity.

Batumi’s pastry culture is worth a deliberate morning’s exploration — the traditional pastry shops in the older neighbourhoods of the city, away from the seafront tourist strip, give the clearest picture of this hybrid sweet tradition.

Where to eat Adjaran food

Batumi

Batumi is not short of restaurants — the seafront development of the past decade has produced a dense concentration of eating options ranging from tourist-trap to genuinely excellent. The most reliable approach is to move away from the Boulevard and into the older neighbourhoods of the city: Marjanishvili, the area around the Piazza, the lower market district. Family-run restaurants and home-kitchen operations in these areas serve the real Adjaran table.

The central market (open mornings) is essential for understanding the food culture: fresh kaymaghi from mountain producers, local beans, fresh fish, churchkhela and gozinaki from village makers, and bread from tone bakeries that supply the market from early morning.

For planning a visit, our Batumi beaches guide and day trips from Batumi guide provide wider context for the region.

The Adjaran mountains

The mountain towns and villages above Batumi — accessible by road or marshrutka through increasingly dramatic scenery — offer the most authentic Adjaran mountain food. Khulo, the main highland settlement, has several family guesthouses where evening meals include kaymaghi, borano, mountain lobio, and Adjaran mountain khachapuri. The food here is inseparable from the landscape: you eat the same things the shepherds and farmers eat, with ingredients from the same land.

Shuakhevi, with its new spa resort, offers somewhat more polished mountain Adjaran food; the village restaurants along the Khulo road are more rustic and often more interesting.

The Adjara destination guide

For a full overview of the region — beyond the food — including the best beaches, mountain routes, and historical sites, see our complete Adjara destination guide.

The supra in Adjara

Adjaran supra culture has its own character, reflecting both the shared Georgian feast tradition and the region’s specific history. The presence of Muslim Adjaran families (particularly in the mountain villages) means that some Adjaran supras are conducted without alcohol — grape juice or spring water replacing the wine, but with the full tamada structure and toast sequence maintained. This is one of the more remarkable examples of a cultural form persisting across a significant theological divide.

Orthodox Christian Adjaran supras are more recognisable to Georgian norms, with wine (often the region’s own semi-sweet or sweet reds from the lower valleys), Adjaruli khachapuri, fresh fish when near the coast, and the full progression of Megrelian-influenced dishes that the region shares with its neighbours.

FAQ

Is Adjaran food very different from standard Georgian food? The underlying grammar is the same — khachapuri, walnut sauces, fresh herbs, supra culture. The distinctions are in the dairy products (kaymaghi, borano), the fish cooking, the sweet pastry tradition, and the particular character of Adjaran mountain food. It is recognisably Georgian with a distinct coastal-Ottoman inflection.

Where is the best place to eat Adjaruli khachapuri? In Adjara itself — and specifically in the mountain villages of Adjara rather than on the Batumi tourist strip. The combination of wood-fired tone ovens, fresh local cheese, and highland butter produces results that urban restaurants struggle to match. See our khachapuri guide for more.

What wine does Adjara produce? Adjara is not a major wine region by Georgian standards — the climate is too humid for the best viticulture. The region produces some semi-sweet and sweet wines from local varieties in the lower valleys, primarily for local consumption. Most wine drunk in Adjara is imported from Kakheti.

When is the best time to eat fresh fish in Batumi? Hamsi (anchovy) season is late autumn and winter. Mullet is best in summer and early autumn. The fish market is most active on weekday mornings when weather has allowed overnight fishing.