Where to eat piti, halva, and Caucasus mountain cooking
Piti is Sheki's defining dish — lamb, chickpeas, and dried fruit slow-cooked for hours in an individual clay pot, served with the broth poured over torn bread first as a starter, then the meat and chickpeas eaten as a main. Almost every restaurant in town serves a version, but quality varies a lot with how long it's actually been cooked.
A genuinely good piti needs three to four hours minimum. If a restaurant can produce it within twenty minutes of ordering, it likely isn't made fresh that day.
The bazaar's halva stalls are the real destination here, not a sit-down café. Sheki halva is denser and more saffron-forward than the version sold elsewhere in Azerbaijan, layered with walnut and sometimes almond. Buy a small box to try before committing to a large one — recipes vary noticeably stall to stall.