Caucasian Food: Shared Tables and Distinct Flavours Across Three Countries

In Sheki’s old quarter, a halva-maker layers rice-paper-thin dough by hand — rishta, laid eight or ten sheets deep around a filling of hazelnut, cardamom and coriander, the whole tray finished with a saffron pattern before the syrup goes on. A few days and one border away, a Kakhetian host draws wine straight from a qvevri, a clay vessel sealed and buried in the earth by a method that predates the pyramids. Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan sit against each other on the map, and their tables share the same raw materials — wheat, walnuts, honey, the grape — yet each country has shaped those materials into something entirely its own. That is the pleasure of Caucasian food eaten this way, region by region, on Odyssey’s 22-day small group tour of the Caucasus: one country’s table giving onto the next, close enough to compare, different enough to surprise.

Azerbaijan’s Table: Tea, Halva and the Silk Road Bazaar

The tour begins in Baku, and the first taste of the country arrives quietly: a welcome dinner in a local restaurant on the night of arrival, before the sightseeing starts. It is on the Absheron Peninsula, a day later, that food becomes part of the landscape itself. Outside Gala village, near the Ateshgah fire temple and the burning gas vents of Yanar Dag, the group stops for a traditional Azerbaijani tea — strong, black, and poured into a small pear-shaped glass known as an armudu. Tea here is customarily taken with a cube of sugar held between the teeth rather than stirred in, alongside jam, dried fruit or, fittingly, a slice of halva.

The real introduction to Azerbaijani sweets comes further inland, in Sheki. This former Silk Road caravan town, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, is where the group wanders the local bazaar among stalls selling handicrafts, souvenirs and — above everything else — halva. Sheki halva is not the crumbly sesame paste sold across the wider Middle East; it is a syrup-soaked pastry, dozens of paper-thin rice-flour layers stacked around crushed hazelnuts, cardamom and coriander, with the top tray finished in a lattice of saffron. Families in Sheki have made it this way for generations, and the bazaar’s halva sellers are as much a part of the town’s identity as its palace of stained-glass windows, which the group visits the same day.

Georgia’s Wine Route and the Kakheti Table

Crossing into Georgia, the food shifts as quickly as the landscape does. In Telavi, the gateway to the Kakheti wine region, the group is shown the local method of bread-baking and taught to make churchkhela — walnuts threaded on a string, dipped repeatedly in thickened grape juice until they set into a dense, sweet log some travellers describe as “Georgian snickers,” though the comparison undersells it. The next day, in the fortified hill town of Signagi, lunch is taken at a local wine cellar in the heart of the Kakheti wine region — Georgia’s most productive wine district and the source of much of what the country exports.

Meals in Georgia carry their own social architecture. A proper spread — a supra — is built around a toastmaster, or tamada, who leads a structured sequence of toasts through the evening: to peace, to family, to guests, to those no longer at the table. Visitors are rarely spectators for long; a tamada will usually draw newcomers into a toast of their own before the night is out, and the group meets the tradition first-hand at the Kakheti wine cellar lunch, alongside the wine itself.

Georgian wine is inseparable from Georgian food, and the reason has more to do with geology than romance. For thousands of years, Georgian winemakers have fermented and aged wine in qvevri, large egg-shaped clay vessels buried below ground, where a stable temperature lets the grape skins, seeds and stems ferment together with the juice for months. The result is an amber, tannic wine unlike almost anything made in stainless steel or oak — a technique explored in full in our guide to Georgian wine and qvevri. On this tour, that history is tasted rather than explained: a glass poured straight from the vessel, in the region where the method began.

How many meals are included, and will I actually get to taste local specialities?

Most of them. The tour includes 21 breakfasts, 20 lunches and 17 dinners across the 22 days, and a large share of those meals are built around a specific regional dish or producer rather than a generic hotel buffet: the wine cellar lunch in Kakheti, the bread-baking and churchkhela demonstration in Telavi, the halva bazaar stop in Sheki, the Sulguni cheese tasting with a local family in Ushguli, the Adjarian khachapuri lunch near Batumi, and a brandy tasting at a factory in Yerevan. Each country also holds a farewell dinner built around national cuisine and live music, so food runs as a thread through the itinerary rather than sitting as an afterthought.

Cheese, Family Kitchens and the High Caucasus

West of Tbilisi, the tour climbs into Svaneti, the mountain region where Georgia’s Svan people built defensive stone towers into nearly every village and kept their own dialect and customs largely intact through centuries of relative isolation. In Ushguli — at around 2,100 metres, one of the highest permanently inhabited settlements in Europe — the group is welcomed into a local family’s home to learn about and taste Sulguni, the brined, semi-hard cheese that underpins much of Georgian and Svan cooking. It is a slightly sour, stretchy cheese, closer in texture to a young mozzarella than to anything alpine, and it turns up again a few days later in one of Georgia’s best-known exports.

On the coast in Batumi, lunch is a plate of Adjarian khachapuri: a boat-shaped loaf of bread filled with a soft, salted cheese, topped with a raw egg and a knob of butter, both stirred into the molten cheese at the table just before eating. It is, in its way, Georgia’s answer to a question every Caucasian country seems to ask separately — bread and cheese together, but never quite the same way twice. Travellers wanting the fuller picture of the region the cheese and wine come from can also read our guide to Ushguli and the Svan towers.

Will I get any hands-on cooking or craft experiences, or is it all restaurant dining?

A mix of both, with a genuine hands-on element built in rather than bolted on. In Telavi, the group is shown the local bread-baking method and learns to make churchkhela; in Ushguli, the cheese tasting happens inside a Svan family’s own kitchen rather than a restaurant set up for tour groups. Most other food moments — the Sheki bazaar, the Kakheti wine cellar, the Batumi khachapuri lunch, the Yerevan brandy tasting — are guided tastings and demonstrations rather than classes, which suits a group with a wide range of interests and mobility levels.

Armenia’s Brandy Country and the Farewell Table

Armenia closes the tour, and its food culture centres less on the bazaar than on the cellar. In Yerevan, alongside the genocide memorial and the Matenadaran manuscript museum, the group visits one of the city’s historic brandy factories for a tour and tasting of Armenian brandy. Armenian brandy production dates to 1887, built on the Charentais method brought over from France, and the country’s brandy carries a long-standing reputation among connoisseurs — according to a well-known local story, it was a particular favourite of Winston Churchill’s. The tasting room, lined with oak barrels signed by decades of visiting dignitaries, is as much a museum stop as a food one.

The final formal meal of the tour is a farewell dinner in Yerevan built around national cuisine and live music — the third such dinner of the trip, following equivalents in Baku and Georgia, each one a deliberate bookend to that country’s stretch of the journey rather than a generic “last night” event.

Can vegetarian travellers and other dietary requirements be accommodated?

Yes — Odyssey asks travellers to advise any dietary requirements, allergies or medical conditions at the time of booking, and local guides and restaurants across all three countries are used to arranging around them.

What Ties Caucasian Food Together

Seen from the road rather than as three separate restaurant lists, the connections are as telling as the differences. Wheat bread appears at every table, but as syrup-soaked pastry in Sheki, as Adjarian khachapuri in Batumi, and as the thin lavash that accompanies almost every Armenian meal. Grapes and viticulture run through all three countries — Georgia’s underground qvevri, Kakheti’s wine-cellar lunches and Armenia’s brandy cellars are variations on the same South Caucasus relationship with the vine, shaped differently by geography, empire and religion. Walnuts, honey and syrup turn up as dessert everywhere, from Sheki halva to Georgian churchkhela to the sugared fruit that closes an Armenian dinner. Even the routes those ingredients travelled overlap: the same Silk Road trade that carried saffron and cardamom into Azerbaijani sweets also shaped the spice cupboards of Georgia and Armenia, though each country folded the same imports into a distinct culinary identity rather than a shared one.

None of this is accidental. The route this tour follows, from Baku to Yerevan by way of Kakheti, Svaneti and the Black Sea coast, was built around exactly this kind of layered contact — trade routes, shared mountains and centuries of overlapping empires that left three distinct food cultures within a day’s drive of each other. Eating your way along it, one region and one speciality at a time, is arguably the clearest way to understand how these three countries are connected, and how firmly each still holds onto what makes it different.

Is the walking and standing at markets, bazaars and wine cellars manageable for less mobile travellers?

Most food stops are gentle by design — a bazaar stroll in Sheki, a seated lunch in a wine cellar, a family visit in Ushguli — but the tour overall is rated Level 2 – Moderate, meaning travellers should be able to carry their own luggage and manage 3 to 5 hours of physical activity a day, including walking on uneven ground for up to 8 kilometres. Cobbled old towns in Baku, Tbilisi and Sheki, and the mountain paths around Mestia and Ushguli, are the more demanding stretches of the tour; the food-focused stops themselves rarely involve more than a short, level walk.

Three countries, one route, and a table that keeps changing shape — that is the honest case for eating your way through the Caucasus rather than reading about it. Halva in Sheki, wine drawn from the earth in Kakheti, cheese made by hand in a Svan kitchen, brandy aged in Yerevan: none of it substitutes for the others, and none of it is quite what the neighbouring country makes of the same raw ingredients. It is a journey best taken slowly, at one table at a time.