In 1874, Georgian writer Barbare Jorjadze published the first Georgian cookbook. A hundred and fifty years later, her recipes form the backbone of a menu that has just landed on World’s 50 Best Discovery. Barbarestan is only one of three Tbilisi restaurants now on international rankings.
Contents:
- What the Three Tbilisi Restaurants Have in Common
- Café Littera: the Writers’ House courtyard and Tekuna Gachechiladze’s kitchen
- Keto and Kote: a 19th-century mansion and an opera for a name
- Barbarestan: 1874 recipes and a former butcher shop
- Georgia’s food tourism and the Armenian angle
- The common thread
What the Three Tbilisi Restaurants Have in Common
Café Littera, Keto and Kote and Barbarestan are all listed on World’s 50 Best Discovery, a database run by the organizers of the world’s best-known restaurant ranking. One detail worth understanding: Discovery doesn’t rank restaurants, and you can’t buy your way in. A restaurant gets listed on the votes of 50 Best’s regional academies — the same experts who compile the main ranking. It isn’t a tourist “best of” list; it’s a professional record, earned on the strength of the food.
Café Littera made the list twice over. In 2025, the restaurant also entered La Liste, the French ranking of the world’s best restaurants. It works differently from a guide staffed by inspectors: an algorithm pools more than 1,100 professional sources from nearly 200 countries into a single score from 0 to 100, where online reviews count for just 10%. La Liste puts Café Littera’s score at 83.5. Forbes, back in October 2022, had already put all three addresses on its “12 Best Restaurants in Tbilisi” list at once. All of this in one city. And right now, Tbilisi is setting the context for modern Caucasian cuisine.
Café Littera: the Writers’ House courtyard and Tekuna Gachechiladze’s kitchen
Café Littera opened in May 2015 in the courtyard of the Writers’ House of Georgia, at 13 Ivane Machabeli Street — inside a 1905 Sarajishvili mansion, in the old Sololaki quarter.
At the stove is Tekuna Gachechiladze. Within the trade, she’s known as the “godmother” of modern Georgian gastronomy. She trained at a culinary academy in New York and was among the first to treat Georgian culinary tradition at a serious restaurant level — not as local color, but as a culinary system in its own right. The result: La Liste 2025 and World’s 50 Best Discovery.
Keto and Kote: a 19th-century mansion and an opera for a name
Keto and Kote occupies a 19th-century mansion in a dead-end lane at 3 Zandukeli, in the Vera district. The name nods to Victor Dolidze’s Georgian comic opera. That’s cultural context, not decoration. The kitchen is run by Ramaz Gemiashvili, one of Tbilisi’s leading chefs. He keeps traditional Georgian cuisine exact — down to khinkali with precisely pleated dough. The restaurant is on World’s 50 Best Discovery.
Barbarestan: 1874 recipes and a former butcher shop
Barbarestan occupies a former butcher shop at 132 David Aghmashenebeli Avenue, in a restored 19th-century building. The restaurant opened in December 2015, and the whole concept grew out of a single find: the founding family bought Barbare Jorjadze’s 1874 cookbook at a flea market by the Dry Bridge. The book holds 807 recipes; the team has recreated roughly 200 of them for the menu. Jorjadze was the first Georgian feminist and the first woman to write a Georgian cookbook; the chefs rebuild her dishes using seasonal local produce.
Forbes put Barbarestan on the same “12 Best Restaurants in Tbilisi” list. It’s on World’s 50 Best Discovery too.
Georgia’s food tourism and the Armenian angle
Restaurants making world lists don’t happen in a vacuum. According to Georgia’s National Tourism Administration, the country welcomed a record 5,521,866 foreign tourists in 2025 — up 8.4% from the year before, and an all-time high. Food isn’t background for them: food and drink accounted for 23% of total spending, 3.5 billion lari out of roughly 15 billion. In Georgia, cuisine is a revenue line, not a pleasant add-on to the itinerary.
The government gets it. Georgia’s National Tourism Administration launched a year-long campaign with Jamie Oliver in mid-2024 — 20 videos, produced by the BBC, entirely about Georgian food. It shows up in the culinary indexes too: per TasteAtlas’s 2025/26 rankings, Georgian cuisine placed 21st among the world’s hundred best cuisines, and adjaruli khachapuri made the list of top pies.
For Armenian readers, this is directly relevant. According to official entry statistics, Armenia is Georgia’s third-largest source of tourists after Russia and Turkey: 948,299 visits in 2024, or 14.6% of the total flow, plus another 390,788 in the first half of 2025. That means the Tbilisi model — a restaurant selling not “national color” but a clear idea built around a chef’s name and a story behind the menu — isn’t some distant idea over the mountain. It’s the neighboring market, one that Armenia’s hospitality trade and its guests visit constantly.
The common thread
Three different entry points — a place, an opera, a book — and one direction: a clear culinary idea anchored in a specific story and a specific person at the stove.