Heidelberg Haus

Heidelberg Haus is Batumi's Bavarian outlier — a timber-fronted German beer hall and restaurant, opened in 2009 by a Georgian-German couple, with an on-site microbrewery that produces three lagers and a dunkel under the supervision of a trained Bavarian brewer flown in twice a year. It should not work on the Black Sea. It does.

The cooking is a mix of serious German classics (schweinshaxe with sauerkraut, bratwurst platters, wiener schnitzel the size of a plate) and a smaller Georgian section for diners who drift in from the boulevard. The kitchen makes its own sausages in-house; the pretzels come out of the oven on the hour; the pork knuckle is cured for 24 hours before roasting. The beer is the best on the Black Sea coast.

Two rooms: a front beer hall with long oak tables seating 40; a back garden with a summer awning seating 30. The crowd is 90 percent local — this is where Batumi's Georgian-German business community meets — which makes it the most unaffected room in a city that can feel tourist-heavy in peak summer. Service is in Russian and Georgian; the menu is trilingual; cash is preferred but cards work.

For Solo Dining: Heidelberg Haus has bar-stool seating at the front beer hall, a bottomless reading-friendly beer list, and the kind of unpretentious, overwhelmingly local atmosphere that rewards a book at 19:00. Order a pretzel, a litre of the house helles, and a bratwurst platter. The bill is under $20. Nobody will hurry you.