Georgian Desserts: The Sweets to Know and Where to Eat Them in Tbilisi

Traditional Georgian sweets are built from what a village has once the harvest is in: grape must, walnuts, hazelnuts, honey and a little flour. The must is boiled down until it's thick and sweet on its own, which is why the old recipes need little or no sugar.

The grape sweets come out of the same harvest as Georgian wine. Once the grapes are pressed, some of the juice goes off to ferment and some goes into a wide pot to be boiled down for pelamushi, tatara and churchkhela.

They belong to occasions more than to menus. In the reviews we've gathered for the restaurants and cafes on our lists, honey cake comes up again and again and pelamushi not once, so the old sweets are something you go looking for rather than stumble on.

Churchkhela is a string of nuts dipped again and again in tatara, grape must thickened with wheat flour, then hung up to dry into a chewy stick about the length of your forearm. It's the Georgian sweet every visitor meets, it's sold at bazaar stalls across the city, and it keeps for months, which is why so much of it ends up in suitcases.

The classic from Kakheti has walnut halves inside. In western Georgia the version called janjukha uses hazelnuts and a must thickened with corn flour, and in Racha you'll find dried fruit, apricots and pumpkin seeds on the string instead.

A good churchkhela is matte and firm but still bends, and a faint white bloom on the skin is sugar, not mould. The name is protected too: churchkhela sits on Georgia's register of geographical indications alongside chacha and sulguni, and its specification says it can only be made in Georgia.

Pelamushi is grape juice boiled down and set with white corn meal into a soft pudding the colour of the grapes it came from. Tatara is the same thing made with dark wheat flour, and it's tatara that coats a Kakhetian churchkhela.

The method on Georgia's tourism board's pelamushi page takes late-harvest grapes from October or November, boils the pressed juice in a wide lidless pot called a chakhana, then stirs in about 1 cup of corn meal per litre and simmers it for 25 to 30 minutes. No sugar goes in, because the boiled juice is sweet enough, and the same page dates corn meal's arrival in Georgia, from Italy, to the second half of the 17th century.

In Guria and Adjara the boiled-down juice is called petmezi, and badagi is the word you'll hear for the plain boiled must before any flour goes in. Pelamushi is a home and harvest sweet more than a menu item, so your best chance of a bowl in Tbilisi is a festival stall in October.

Gozinaki is walnuts and honey and very little else. The tourism board's recipe boils the honey, stirs in roasted, crushed walnuts and a little sugar, spreads the mass on a wet wooden board and cuts it into diamonds while it's still hot.

It's so tied to New Year that the same page calls it a synonym for the holiday, and it's a common gift at that time of year. Newer versions swap the walnuts for hazelnuts, almonds, sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds, and every version is dairy-free, though the honey means it isn't vegan.

Beyond the big 4, the rest belong to a region, a holiday or a single ritual. Georgia's tourism board lists kada, Georgian doughnuts, baklava, dried fruit, churchkhela and tklapi among the sweets you can buy on the street in Tbilisi, and the others you'll meet at a table or on a road trip.

Sweet	What it is	Where or when you'll meet it
Tklapi	A thin sheet of dried fruit purée, sweet or sour; sour plum tklapi also goes into cooking	Street stalls in Tbilisi and the Tbilisoba festival in October
Nazuki	A sweet bread with raisins, cinnamon and cloves, best baked in a clay tone oven; the word comes from Persian	Roadside tone ovens in Surami, where a stretch of road is known as Nazukebi
Kada	A filled pastry; the sweet kind has a buttery, sugary filling, and ritual versions are baked for holidays	Street stalls around Tbilisi
Pakhlava	Georgia's baklava: layered pastry, nuts and syrup, most associated with Adjara	Adjara; in Tbilisi, the Turkish-style pastry shops sell the baklava version
Burme	An Adjarian roll of pastry, butter and walnuts soaked in hot syrup with saffron and lemon	Adjarian kitchens, on the Black Sea coast
Majuni	Rice, honey and black pepper	Weddings in Adjara
Korkoti	Boiled wheat with walnuts, honey, raisins and sugar, also called tsandili	The meal after a funeral, in every region of Georgia
Paska	The Easter cake	Easter weekend, next to the red eggs

Korkoti is the one that isn't a treat. It's cooked at home for the meal after a funeral, the most solemn kind of Georgian supra, and it's on that table in every region of the country.

Nazuki is the one worth a detour. Surami, a small town in central Georgia, sells it from roadside tone ovens, and the local name for that stretch of road, Nazukebi, just means the nazukis.

Most traditional sweets are tied to a date, so what you can find depends on when you're here. Here's the calendar in a single table, with the church dates converted to the civil calendar Georgia's holidays run on.

When	The sweet	Why then
Autumn, after the grape harvest	Churchkhela, tatara, badagi	They're made from fresh must once the grapes are pressed
October and November	Pelamushi	The traditional recipe calls for late-harvest grapes
October, Tbilisoba	Churchkhela, janjukha, pelamushi, tatara, tklapi, dried fruit	The city festival's pop-up stalls sell them side by side
New Year, 1 January	Gozinaki, churchkhela	Gozinaki is the holiday's sweet and a common gift
Fast days: most Wednesdays and Fridays, late November to 6 January, and Lent (15 March to 1 May in 2027)	Churchkhela, pelamushi, tatara	Strict fast days rule out eggs, dairy and oil, and none of them goes into these
Easter (2 May in 2027)	Paska	The Easter cake that ends Lent
Weddings in Adjara	Majuni	Rice, honey and black pepper, made for the wedding table
A mourning supra	Korkoti	Boiled wheat with honey and walnuts, cooked at home

Christmas is on 7 January here, because the Georgian Church keeps the old Julian calendar, so the Nativity fast runs right up to it and New Year lands in the middle. If gozinaki is what you're after, come in the run-up to 1 January.

The counters at Tbilisi's cake shops look more like a Soviet-era cafe than a harvest table. Honey cake, napoleon, eclairs and cheesecake are what their reviewers keep naming, and none of them is an old Georgian recipe.

Honey cake, medoki in Georgian and medovik in Russian, is thin layers of honey sponge stacked with cream, a Soviet-era cafe classic. The napoleon is the Russian-speaking world's take on mille-feuille, puff pastry stacked with custard, and you'll find both on the counters of the city's best cake shops.

A slice and a coffee is a small decision: one reviewer puts a big slice of chocolate cake with Baileys at Dessert Ballet at 12 GEL, and Google puts a visit to Cafe Madeleine at 10 to 20 GEL a head. Honey cake with a coffee is the easy afternoon order at Tbilisi's cafes, and it turns up in the reviews of Zilina Cafe on Lado Asatiani St as well.

Honey cake also turns up at the end of restaurant meals. At Ethnographer Restaurant one reviewer's birthday table was brought one by the staff, and on the fine-dining side Reserve's honey cake comes up twice in its review topics and one reviewer at Fragment singles theirs out.

Georgian patisseries and their walnut cakes

For a cake with a Georgian accent, go to a Georgian patisserie. Patisserie Bela has been baking since 1993 and calls itself the first Georgian confectionery brand, carrying on family recipes next to newer desserts, and Madart, founded in 2009, now runs 5 branches across the city.

Lika, a Tbilisi bakery whose own description promises homemade cakes, gets reviews for its eclairs and for bird's milk, the Soviet-era soufflé cake under a chocolate glaze. Ponchiki, doughnuts often filled with custard, are the other Soviet-era classic, and doughnuts and kada are the sweet end of Tbilisi street food.

A few Tbilisi kitchens turn Georgian classics into dessert. The most talked-about is the chocolate khinkali at Khinkali Bar N1 on Meidan, with 68 mentions in its reviews: dumplings filled with milk chocolate and served with vanilla ice cream, according to its Instagram.

Reviewers there also mention khinkali with cherries 57 times, so a table can finish on a sweet round of the same dumplings it started with. It's open 1 PM to 11:30 PM daily, and table reservations are free.

Ice cream is where Georgian flavours go furthest. At The Cone Culture on Taras Shevchenko St, reviewers mention the blue cheese ice cream 31 times and ice cream with adjika 5 times, and one reviewer's picks were Georgian cheese with tarragon and chocolate adjika with candied orange.

Another reviewer sums the shop up as local, seasonal Georgian flavours next to the classics. That's the move: 1 scoop you know and 1 you'd never order at home.

The grape sweets are vegan by recipe: pelamushi and tatara are grape juice and flour, and churchkhela adds nuts. That makes them fasting food too, since on a strict Orthodox fast day no meat, eggs, dairy, fish, wine or oil is eaten, and the calendar Georgia's church follows sets fasts on most Wednesdays and Fridays plus 4 long seasons.

It's the same rule that shapes vegetarian Georgian food, and the Georgian word samarkhvo, for the fast, marks dishes made without meat, dairy or eggs. Gozinaki is dairy-free but made with honey, and it's worth reading the label on a factory-made churchkhela rather than assuming.

For vegan cake, go to Stricha on Anton Purtseladze St, where one reviewer says everything is vegan and another recommends the honey cake and the sernik. The doughnuts are the draw, with 57 mentions, but 2 reviewers say they're made only at weekends and one warns they sell out fast, so go early on a Saturday.

Churchkhela is sold at bazaar stalls all over the city and at a couple of wine shops, which are the easier stop if you're buying a bottle anyway. A stall usually charges less than a souvenir shop for the same stick, so buy the bulk of it there.

For gifts, churchkhela and gozinaki are the obvious pair, since both are solid and gozinaki is already a common present at New Year. They sit happily next to the other Georgian food souvenirs worth packing, from spice blends to wine.