Black Sea boomtown — Adjarian cuisine, glowing skyscrapers at midnight, and the most unexpected food culture in the Caucasus
Batumi is the capital of Adjara, a subtropical autonomous republic on Georgia's Black Sea coast where the mountains meet the sea and the food is a distinct regional cuisine all its own. The Adjarian table is among the most celebrated in the Georgian culinary universe: Adjarian khachapuri (a boat-shaped bread filled with molten cheese, topped with a raw egg and a pat of butter — the regional dish that became Georgia's most exported food image), Adjarian chikhirtma (hen soup with eggs and vinegar), and muzhuzhi (cold jellied pork). The city itself is a surreal collision of Ottoman-era stone all…
Batumi was a small Ottoman port town known as Batum for most of recorded history, traded between Georgia, the Ottoman Empire, and Persia depending on who was winning the regional power struggles. It was ceded to Russia in 1878 after the Russo-Turkish War and immediately transformed: the discovery of Baku oil (across the Caspian, via pipeline to Batum) made the city the oil export hub of the Russian Empire by 1900, and the town was rebuilt with European oil-boom money. The Rothschilds and Nobel family both operated refineries and tanker fleets out of Batum. Batumi was incorporated into Soviet…