Photo courtesy of Elliot Friar.
On a quiet side street in the Lavapies neighborhood of Madrid, tables in a glowing restaurant are crowded with wine glasses filled not with Spanish Ribeira but Georgian Saperavi. Hand-made mini qvevri, egg-shaped vessels which have been used for underground wine fermentation since 6000 BCE, are strung on the walls beside black-and-white photos. Didedas is one of six Georgian restaurants in the Spanish capital. Five have opened since 2023.
“When we got married, no one knew where Georgia was,” say owners Ana Elbakidze, from Tbilisi, and Alfredo Muñoz, from Madrid; “And when we first opened, almost every customer was trying Georgian food for the first time.” Nearly two years after the first opening, reservations are scarcely available, and expansion plans are on the table, along with expertly prepared nigvziani badrijani (rolled eggplant with walnuts).
Nigvziani badrijani (rolled eggplant with walnuts). Photo courtesy of Elliot Friar.
Georgian food is not as unfamiliar as it used to be. The New Yorker forecast the rise of the cuisine in 2019, and a mass appeal moment has finally arrived across Western Europe. Outside of Madrid, nearly one-third of Georgian restaurants in London listed on Google have opened in the past two years — far outpacing single-digit growth in the city’s limping restaurant industry. In early 2025, Denmark welcomed its first Georgian restaurant in the wealthy district of Osterbro. Michelin inspectors have taken notice, placing the first Georgian establishments in their vaunted guide, with spots in New York City, upstate New York, Madrid, and London.
What is causing the ascendance of this small nation’s cuisine? There are, at first, simple explanations: The Russian embargo against Georgian wine in 2006, affecting over 80 percent of exports at the time, did, in fact, spur a mad dash at specialization and competition tilted towards large export markets in the United States and Europe. This came after the successful Rose Revolution in 2003, ushering in a new leader and neoliberal trade reform. While the embargo ended in 2013 and Russia is still the destination for more than half of Georgian wine exports, a natural wine trend has been beneficial in boosting both exported units and value to wealthier countries. Ana and Alfredo, who met working at a bar in London, moved to Georgia briefly in 2006 before leaving because of instability, winding up in Madrid.
Traditional variety of pkhali and cornbread. Photo courtesy of Elliot Friar.
A closer political relationship with Europe may be another reason. After visa liberalization with the European Union’s Schengen Area in 2020, Georgia accounted for a surprising number of asylum applications, enough for the Bundesrat to recognize the country as safe in 2023, making rejections far more likely for most asylum applications. Legal migration flows, including asylum, remain minuscule in the tens of thousands.
Along with Schengen visa liberalization, tourism in the opposite direction, and from the continent, is booming. British Airways announced four weekly direct flights between London and Tbilisi in 2025. Ana says one of her Spanish customers, a teenager, returned from visiting the country and has learned enough Georgian to keep the conversation between bites of medovik (layered honey cake typical in former Soviet cuisines). Such dishes may be attracting ever-increasing tourists from Israel, the largest source of tourism to Georgia aside from its bordering countries, likely from the more than one million Russian-speaking Israeli citizens as a result of post-Soviet migration. One might speculate Israelis are keen on tasting Georgia’s more Persianate-influenced cuisine in what center-right economist Tyler Cowen calls “multiculturalism without controversy.”
There may be other contributing factors, such as the increasing real cost of dining out, along with increasing costs of labor. These are favorable conditions for dishes made with hard-to-find ingredients and hard-to-learn techniques — why spend 15 pounds on a burger when you could spend 16 pounds on khinkali, a Georgian dumpling originating from Silk Road cultural exchange? Khinkali is eaten by hand, usually without eating its doughy stem handle, providing both a traditional experience and opportunities for I’ve-Done-This-Before status for cosmopolitan diners. This is especially true as high-income groups spend more on out-of-home dining while spending for low-income groups has stalled.
For example, sourcing a type of Georgian cheese known as sulguni — the heart (guli) and soul (suli) of Georgian cuisine — was challenging for Didedas. They worked with a Spanish cheesemaker who had never made sulguni, asking them to only start the cheese culture process before handing curds to the restaurant for cheddaring and curing. As for technique, Ana says she didn’t know any Georgians in Madrid but required their cooking knowledge and famously hospitable disposition. “I knew there was one place I could find Georgians, and that was church. That’s how I found my team.” These explanations — as Georgian religiosity pairs with reality and myth of exotic culinary tradition — may force us to lie in the long history of Georgian cultural dissemination to understand its cresting wave.
The history of Georgian culture
A departure point for understanding Georgian cultural dissemination may be Leo Tolstoy and Mikhail Lermontov’s romantic depictions of a traditional, solidly agrarian life in Russian literature. Such works may be read as mirrors of Georgian poet Ilia Chavchavadze’s cultural entrepreneurship of national identity, which focused on “recovering [Georgia’s] history, culture, and language while at the same time developing a strong appreciation for imperial culture,” writes historian Adrian Brisku. In the early 20th century, a short-lived Georgian Democratic Republic promoted this tradition as being civilizationally connected to Greece and Europe. Five thousand years before Hesiod wrote of Prometheus and his punishment in a Georgian cave, researchers believe the world’s first wine was being produced in Georgia, in buried qvevri.
After the Soviet invasion, a member of the Georgian winemaking trust, Samtrest, was assigned to open a new restaurant in Moscow’s historic theatre district. The restaurant, named Aragvi, played on earlier intrigue with Persianate and Turkic influences, serving “Oriental coffee” to opera-going guests and being featured in the English-language Fodor’s travel guide for decades to come. The Kremlin exerted control while resistance was partially negotiable — after an attempt to make Russian an official language met significant protest, Moscow accepted Georgian as the sole official language in 1978. This excluded sizable populations of ethnic minorities.
In the years since independence, the country’s relationships with Russia and the European Union have shifted. Inching ever closer to the former, the ruling party, the Georgian Dream (GD), has damaged much of its ties with the West in a short time while accusing socially progressive movements, such as LGBTQ+ rights, of ruining Georgian traditionalism.
Philosopher Roland Barthes writes that the French culinary project — the original “cuisine” — is only permitted to be innovative when it re-discovers secrets from the past, as dishes represent “the flavorful survival of an old, rural society” against encroaching non-tradition. Georgian cuisine’s pre-modern myth and reality is a key differentiator in Western Europe. However, Georgia suffers from more salient outcomes of a political embrace of tradition. To borrow a term from online fascists, cuisine may permit a “retvrn” without controversy for would-be diners. Diners in Moscow had similar intrigue.
Kinkally is one of the new Georgian restaurants in London — opening a few years after Aragvi in Moscow permanently closed. The restaurant transgresses tradition; one can eat black-striped wasabi khinkali with their hands before visiting “Kinky Bar” downstairs. In the 1940s, German scholar and advisor to the Iranian government William Haas lamented the Westernization of Iranian cuisine. “The rich, even extravagant old Persian cuisine, with its surprising variety of luscious dishes is disappearing rapidly … the impact of Western ways — all this is a sad contribution to the increasing monotony of life on the globe.” The cosmopolitan Western European coveted an old, almost primordial cuisine bastardized by globalization while carrying out its policy project. Contra Haas, Iranian historian Houchang Chehabi argues the cuisine is alive and well in part because of its international adoption and fusion, as “its availability … has helped relieve the monotony of life elsewhere.”
While Georgian identity is contested from within and against external political and economic forces, the many faces of its culinary culture — for example, the Instagram-fodder dish adjarian khachapuri coming from an ethnically Georgian and religiously Muslim region bordering Turkey — traces a past that cuts across this contestation. One hopes the public does not find ideas from this past, both us-versus-them nationalism and strong-over-weak imperialism, as tempting or tasty.
At Didedas, three crayon-drawn national flags of Spain, Georgia, and Ukraine are displayed prominently behind the bar. “My sister is protesting every day in Georgia,” Ana says, “and we want to support the Ukrainian people, too.”
