Tbilisi - The Qvevri

A qvevri is a clay vessel, wide at the middle and tapered to a point at the base, designed to be buried upright in the earth with the mouth level to the floor. Wine is made inside it, fermented slowly in the dark with skins and seeds over months, drawn out transformed by time and clay and the temperature of the ground. Tbilisi works by similar logic. The city’s best qualities arrive slowly, through repetition and patience, and the most rewarding version of a visit here is always the unhurried one.

Where to Stay

Stamba Hotel, in the Vera district, occupies a former 1950s Soviet printing house whose editorial floors have been converted into a hotel with brass bathtubs, McIntosh hi-fi systems, and a ground-floor social programme that draws as many Tbilisi residents as guests. A Design Hotels member, it is what visitors picture when they think of where to sleep in the city. Rooms Hotel Tbilisi, a few streets away at 14 Merab Kostava Street, is the warmer and more understated counterpart, 122 rooms in a converted publishing house with a farm-to-table kitchen and a social bar that functions as one of the city’s better evening meeting points. The Telegraph Hotel, which opened in 2025 on Rustaveli Avenue in the former main post office building, is a Leading Hotels of the World property with 239 rooms and seven restaurant and bar spaces distributed across its floors.

Where to Eat

Barbarestan, at Davit Aghmashenebeli Avenue 132, built its identity around a cookbook found inside a carved wooden chest at the Dry Bridge flea market. The book, dated 1874 and written by Barbare Jorjadze, the first Georgian woman to publish a cookbook and a significant figure in the 19th-century feminist movement, contained 807 recipes collected from across the Caucasus. The restaurant has been working through them since 2016. Café Littera, in the courtyard of the Georgian Writers’ House at 13 Machabeli Street in Sololaki, was opened by chef Tekuna Gachechiladze and serves seasonal Georgian food in a setting of vines, a low fountain, and 19th-century stonework that does most of the work. Shavi Lomi, the Black Lion, tucked into a Vera courtyard, takes familiar Georgian ingredients and moves them sideways, deconstructing pkhali, building new structures around walnut sauces, and changing the menu weekly with what the market is offering.

Where to Drink

Vino Underground, at 15 Galaktion Tabidze Street, opened in 2012 as the first dedicated natural wine bar in Georgia, owned collectively by six of the country’s best-known artisan producers. The arched brick cellar carries completist lists of qvevri wines across Georgia’s regions, from established names such as John Okro and DoReMi to newer producers arriving each season. Fabrika, the converted Soviet sewing factory in Chugureti, runs a loose cluster of courtyard bars across its concrete forecourt that are best after ten, when the city’s working day has finished. Amber Bar, on Davit Aghmashenebeli Avenue, keeps a focused natural wine programme with over a hundred wines from small family vineyards, served alongside Georgian bread and seasonal small plates.

How to Move

Tbilisi is most legible on foot. Sololaki, the city’s most photogenic neighbourhood, runs along the hillside below Narikala fortress, its art nouveau mansions in various states of careful restoration, a slow accumulation of design shops and courtyard restaurants that have made it the most visited neighbourhood in the city without becoming entirely self-conscious about it. Abanotubani, the sulfur bath district at the base of the old city where the Mtkvari river bends, holds the visible evidence of the warm spring system that gave the city its name. The cable car from Rike Park connects the river-level old city to Narikala on the ridge above, a ten-minute ride that earns its elevation.