Autumn in Georgia has always carried a ritualistic aura: grape harvests, simmering churchkhela, long tables that unfold like theatrical sets across Tbilisi’s courtyards. Yet the newest ritual is quietly measured not in toasts or harvests, but in card transactions. According to TBC Capital, dining expenditures in the country surged by 29% over the past year, with an average cashless check of 38 GEL. The figure looks modest by Western standards, yet its sociological weight is immense. Beneath it lies a portrait of a society renegotiating its economic self-image, its hospitality myth, its class dynamics, and its position within global tourist flows.
This isn’t merely inflation: It is a transformation in cultural behavior—one that belongs in the lineage of anthropological food studies, behavioral economics, and urban sociology.
Anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that food operates as a system of cultural codes rather than pure sustenance. A society’s choice of where, how, and with whom it eats turns into a language. Georgia is rewriting this language at remarkable speed.
A 29% annual rise in dining-out expenditures signals several intertwined cultural shifts: a post-pandemic restoration of “public sociability,” echoing sociologist Georg Simmel’s observations about cafés as laboratories of modern life; a reallocation of household budgets toward experiential consumption—a trend observed globally since the 2010s and deeply theorized by Zygmunt Bauman, who saw late-modern individuals gravitating toward “liquid pleasures” that promise immediacy and identity-building, and; a gradual alignment with urban Southern European cultures, where eating out is woven into the texture of everyday life instead of counted as a luxury.
The numbers reveal a society whose economic confidence fluctuates, yet whose appetite for symbolic participation in public life is growing steadily.
The disparity between residents’ average check (28 GEL) and tourists’ (121 GEL) tells a story familiar to global cities from Barcelona to Marrakesh: the “dual economy” phenomenon. Urban scholars like Saskia Sassen have emphasized how tourist-driven consumption reshapes cities into layered ecosystems where locals and visitors inhabit parallel price realities.
Georgia fits this pattern with peculiar intensity. Why? Behavioral economics uses the concept of “anchoring” to explain spending habits. Tourists arrive with price expectations shaped by Berlin, Dubai, or London; their Georgian prices appear comparatively “light.” Foreigners engage with supra-like generosity, choosing dishes symbolically linked to “authenticity,” which increases bills. Residents behave pragmatically; tourists perform a cultural script. TBC Capital reports that tourists use cash 34% of the time. This aligns with global patterns in Mediterranean and post-Soviet tourist zones, where cash acts as a convenient medium at markets, wine tastings, family-owned guesthouses, and street-food clusters. Cash also reflects psychological comfort: visitors choose tactile transactions to manage unfamiliar tipping norms or avoid exchange-rate uncertainty.
These details illuminate a deeper truth: Georgian hospitality is no longer a purely local ritual. It is becoming a commodity—an exportable cultural product shaped by tourist desire.
The modest average check among residents—28 GEL in a year of rising costs—signals the slow stabilization of a Georgian urban middle class. Sociology often identifies the middle class not through income brackets, but through lifestyles: café culture, casual dining, digital payments, weekend leisure. Tbilisi and Batumi now show all the signs urban anthropologists associate with an emergent metropolitan identity.
Payment behavior shows 66% card use among residents. Digital payment dominance mirrors patterns in Central Europe rather than post-Soviet cash-heavy norms. This movement has parallels in Poland after the early 2000s: the rise of card-based consumption, correlated with expanding financial literacy and the normalization of small luxuries like casual dining.
The 38 GEL cashless check is a status marker. Card transactions carry symbolic weight. Pierre Bourdieu wrote extensively on the ways consumption becomes a field of distinction. In Georgia, choosing a restaurant, posting its interior on Instagram, and paying by card constitute a new form of symbolic capital—urban, modern, connected to global aesthetic currents.
The “average check” becomes a cultural tattoo.
By Ivan Nechaev
