15 Best Cocktail Bars in Tbilisi

The cocktail list here is a tour of Georgian ingredients: pinecone liqueur, smoked chacha, Svan salt and the craft gin from Flavora that the bar introduced on its own Instagram. It is one of the few bars in Tbilisi where you hear more English than Georgian, and the room is casual and cosy, with chess on the tables and a dog you're allowed to pet. Google puts drinks at 10 to 40 GEL. Doors open at 8 PM nightly and close at 3 AM on Friday and Saturday, with karaoke on Tuesday and Sunday, the Foreigners & Friends Meetup on Wednesday and an open mic on Thursday.

Most bars keep a couple of gins behind the counter. This one keeps a collection, and one reviewer counts more than 300 of them. The room is quiet enough to hear the person across from you, which makes it work for a date and for a night on your own in equal measure. The bar seats are where the conversation with whoever is mixing happens. It opens at 7 PM, or 7:30 PM on Tuesday, and pours until 2 AM, with a 1 AM finish on Wednesday.

The sign is small and the entrance is easy to walk straight past, so count the numbers down Galaktion Tabidze until you hit 19. Inside it's small and dark, with art on the walls and a name borrowed from the Georgian Futurists who were rearranging Tbilisi a century ago. The cocktails lean on local flavours and the menu runs long enough to be bound like a book. It opens at 8 PM and pours until 3 AM every night of the week, with DJs on Thursday and a jazz night once a month.

Barbar'a is on the 2nd floor of a Kote Afkhazi building, art deco from the fittings down, with a balcony over the old town if you want the breeze instead of the room. Its own listing describes a huge card of signature cocktails, and the bar was a finalist for the Best Bar Award in Georgia in 2022. The kitchen stays open as long as the bar does, so a cocktail at midnight can turn into tartare, baked camembert and a duck leg. It runs 6 PM to 3 AM, Tuesday to Sunday, and closes on Monday.

One of the first cocktail bars in Tbilisi, by its own description, and still working the same idea: familiar formats rebuilt with Georgian produce. The room on Vasil Petriashvili Street is greenery, lights and music, and Google lists solo dining as what the bar is popular for, so a round on your own is not an odd thing to do here. The menu turns over often enough to reward a second visit, and there is outdoor seating for warm nights. It opens at 8 PM, closes at 1 AM and runs to 3 AM on Friday and Saturday.

Soda opens at 4 PM, and at 2 PM on Saturday and Sunday, which makes it one of the few cocktail bars in town that will serve you before dinner rather than after it. It has been an aperitif bar on Shalva Dadiani Street since 2019: Soda-style classics, drinks built on local ingredients, coffee and homemade cakes, plus crispy lavash snacks that come free with every cocktail, wine and beer. The room is quiet, dogs are allowed and it shuts at 1 AM.

Come for the view and eat before you get here. This rooftop on Doki Turn is selling the city underneath it, at its best at sunset and better once the lights come on, and it holds 4.8 across 2,584 Google reviews largely on those terms. The food menu is short and one reviewer puts the prices above average, so treat it as somewhere for a drink, a hookah and the view. Doors open at 7 PM and stay open until 5 AM, which is later than almost anything else in Tbilisi.

Dinner here is the event rather than the pit stop. Unfound Door sits in a restored 19th-century building on Davit Aghmashenebeli Avenue, the kind of historic interior its own listing leads with, and there's live music while the kitchen runs French technique through Georgian ingredients. The bar is not a sideline either: cocktails come up 47 times in Google's review topics, more often than any dish on the menu. Dinner runs 6 PM to 10:30 PM, or 11:30 PM on Friday and Saturday, and the listing says reservations are required, so book before you dress up.

Ambavi runs as a set of rooms rather than one bar, and the night changes with the door you take. One reviewer counted 2 rooms playing different music, and there is a separate one for smokers. It's women-owned, the rooms are dark, and Google tags the crowd as groups, tourists and LGBTQ+ friendly. Come here when nobody in your group can agree on a genre, or on a volume. Doors open at 7 PM, and Friday and Saturday run to 4 AM.

So Lucky does not run out of evening. Cocktails go to 4 AM most nights and 5 AM on Fridays and Saturdays, with a DJ through the small hours and a kitchen still sending out pizza and side dishes. Its own description promises you'll leave with a few new friends. It's the bar for the hour when your last place starts stacking chairs and nobody wants to be the one who calls it.

Some cocktail bars hand you a menu and leave you to it. At Bar 22 the drink gets built around what you tell the bartender you like instead. It's a cosy room on Galaktion Tabidze with vinyl on the turntable, and homemade tinctures have a way of arriving at the table without being ordered. It opens at 6 PM and keeps going to 5 AM on Fridays and Saturdays, so there is no rush to get there.

This is where you take the friend who orders whisky and means it. The shelves run to premium bottles and rare releases, the owners know the collection well enough to steer you through it, and tastings are part of the programme rather than a one-off. Prices land around what the rest of the city charges. Plan around the week, though: it opens Thursday to Sunday only, 7 PM to 12 AM, so this is the early part of the night.

Whisky Library comes from the founder behind The Gin Corner, applying the same thinking to a different shelf. It's a low-lit cocktail bar in a historic building near London Park, built on whisky-based drinks and neat pours, with a private room for a group that wants a door. The bartenders ask what you like and build from there, so people leave having drunk something off-menu. Google puts the range at 20 to 30 GEL, and doors open at 7 PM, or 7:30 PM on Mondays, Wednesdays and Sundays.

Come here when the group needs something to do with its hands. Ficus keeps Uno and Jenga behind the bar and sells itself on games as much as on drinks, which makes it a room you sit in rather than pass through. It's small, it's near Fabrika, and the kitchen covers pizza, fries and snacks. It opens at 8 PM daily and shuts at 4 AM, which makes it a second stop rather than a first.

You walk down a few steps from Anton Purtseladze to a basement veranda you can see from the road, which is about as much signage as this place gives you. Inside the volume stays low, chamber music included, and the cocktail menu is one the owner spent months building. The kitchen comes from restaurant partners, and the events run from speed dating to tournaments. It's shut on Mondays and pours 7 PM to 2 AM the rest of the week.