Stories from Nectar Bar Edinburgh

We get asked this a lot. More than almost any other question that is not directly about the menu. The answer is yes. We love dogs. We love them in the way that a bar full of people who genuinely, actively love dogs loves them: enthusiastically, without reservation, and in a way that has produced a small but entirely real population of canine regulars who have their favourite spots in the room and who are, in several cases, better known to the team than some of the human guest

Some cocktails are built from a technique. Some are built from an ingredient. Some are built from a conversation between bartenders who push each other toward something neither would have found alone. The Laterna was built from a memory. Kyria Stella and the house on Voulgareos Street On Voulgari Street in Thessaloniki, there is a cocktail bar called Laterna. It has outdoor seating, a neighbourhood warmth that most bars spend years trying to manufacture and never quite achiev

There are cocktails on the Nectar menu that announce their complexity before you taste them. The Tzatziki Martini arrives looking like water and tastes like a Greek kitchen. The Local Connection arrives looking milky and tastes like a very serious cocktail. Both do the thing where the visual information and the flavour information take a moment to reconcile. The Florist does something different. It announces everything immediately. It arrives with a foam sitting across the to

A waiter in Hong Kong once looked at me and said, when I asked for a table for one at a highly acclaimed steakhouse: "Ooh, that's kind of sad." I still sat down. I still ate the steak. It was a good steak, actually, which made the whole thing worse somehow. But I could not let that opening moment go. It sat across from me the entire meal, the uninvited third presence at the table, and by the time I paid the bill I had decided two things. First, that I was never going back. Se

The prawns in tomato sauce are one of the best dishes to come out of Margarita's kitchen. I say that with complete confidence and without much qualification. The sauce is rich and spiced and has a depth that takes time to build. The prawns absorb it properly rather than sitting on top of it. The dish has been on the menu since we opened and it consistently generates the kind of reaction that tells you something has been cooked correctly: the plate comes back empty and the tab

I want to start by saying what this article is not. It is not a list of achievements. It is not a round of self-congratulation wrapped in false modesty. It is not a press release with a photo of a trophy and a quote from a founder about being humbled and grateful, even though I am both of those things and find them genuinely difficult to articulate without sounding like exactly the kind of thing I am trying not to write. This is a thank you. A specific one, to specific people

We have been hosting birthdays since the day we opened, and one of the things I have learned over that time is that there is no single version of a birthday at Nectar. There are several, and which one you get depends almost entirely on how many people are coming. This is not a complaint and it is not a constraint. It is simply how the evening works, and understanding it in advance makes planning considerably easier, whether you are booking a table for two or asking us to hold

One of the questions we get asked most often, across every kind of table and every kind of evening, is: what should we order? It is a genuine question and it deserves a genuine answer, which is usually some version of: look at the menu, find everything you want to try, and order those things. Not because we are avoiding the question, but because the best version of a sharing plate dinner at Nectar is the one built around what you are actually curious about rather than around

If someone says Greek food and the first thing that comes to mind is a gyros, you are not wrong, but you are also only seeing a small corner of a much bigger picture. Gyros, the meat carved off a spit and wrapped in pitta, is genuinely Greek and genuinely good when done properly. But it is street food, the equivalent of judging Italian cooking entirely on a slice of pizza from a takeaway counter. It tells you something true about Greek food, that it is built to be eaten quick

We enter a lot of competitions at Nectar. Cocktail competitions, food competitions, business awards. Some of them we talk about openly. Most of them we keep to ourselves, not because we are secretive about the process, but because we genuinely do not believe that winning an award is a reason for someone to book a table at Nectar. You should come because the food is worth eating and the cocktails are worth drinking, not because we placed in a competition you have never heard o

The old fashioned is my favourite cocktail. It is Panos's favourite too. We agree on very little when it comes to what should go on the Nectar menu, which is why the drinks programme is as good as it is, but on this we have always been aligned. The old fashioned is the drink that, when everything else has been considered and ordered and discussed, is the one we both end up coming back to. Which makes it slightly embarrassing that it took us a year to put one on the menu. Not

There is a moment on the last Friday of every month, somewhere around half past eight, when the room at Nectar changes. It is subtle at first. More people coming through the door than a normal Friday would bring at that hour. Tables that were having a quiet dinner start wrapping things up a little earlier than they otherwise might. And in the corner, DJ Leo is setting up. For the first hour, you would barely notice anything different. The music is quiet, the volume sits under

One of the first guests to try the Bees Essence described it in a way that has stayed with me. They said they had never had a cocktail that keeps going the way this one does. First there is whisky. Then there is sweetness. Then there is spice. And as the spice fades, the other flavours come back. Not a diminishing experience but a circular one, each element returning in sequence, the drink still unfolding long after the glass is empty. That description is more accurate than a

There is a moment that happens at Nectar fairly regularly, usually toward the end of a meal, when a small cold glass arrives at a table that did not order it. We pour mastiha as a house serve for regulars, for large groups who have eaten well and stayed long, and for guests we want to look after in the particular way that the end of a good meal deserves. It is not on the menu. It just appears. A small glass, served cold, clear as water, with a quality that is immediately dist

Before I tell you about the desserts, I want to tell you about the afternoon we chose them. Shortly before Nectar opened, we spent an afternoon working through every Greek dessert we were seriously considering putting on the menu. Twelve desserts in total, tasted properly, discussed properly, argued about in the way that food decisions deserve to be argued about. Alongside them, four coffees each. By the end of it, neither Eirini, Panos nor I were in any condition to make sen

Not every cocktail that makes it onto the permanent menu was designed to be there. Some are built with that intention from the beginning: a concept developed over weeks, a technique refined across many iterations, a name chosen before the recipe is finalised. The Old Beanut was like that. So was the Tzatziki Martini. Both arrived with a deliberateness to them, a sense that they had been thought about until they were ready. The Raspberry Paloma arrived differently. It went ont

The Local Connection is a white negroni. That is the most accurate short description of it. It is also not quite like any white negroni you have tried before, because two of its four ingredients are unusual enough to deserve a proper explanation, and because the technique used to finish it changes the experience of drinking it in a way that the description on the menu does not fully prepare you for. Start with what you know, or what you think you know, and work outward from t

There is a version of Edinburgh that exists in photographs and travel guides. The castle silhouetted against a brooding sky. The Royal Mile in full tourist flow. Arthur's Seat at sunrise. These things are real and they are genuinely worth experiencing. But the Edinburgh that the people who live here love is something slightly different: the city that appears in June when the days get long, in July when the terraces fill up and the light stays until nearly eleven at night, and

Edinburgh is a city that does international food well. That is not something that gets said often enough, partly because the conversation about Edinburgh's food scene tends to focus on its Michelin constellation, its Scottish produce credentials, and its newest openings. All of that is worth the attention it receives. But running quietly alongside the tasting menu narrative is a city that has always been genuinely good at representing cuisines from elsewhere, not in a diluted

One of the things I enjoy most about being part of Edinburgh's bar scene is that the people doing the most interesting work in it are not far away. They are on the same streets, at the same events, in some cases a ten-minute walk from Broughton Street. Iain McPherson is the founder of Panda and Sons on Queen Street, which we have written about before as one of the best cocktail bars in the world. He has spent over a decade building a reputation for techniques that push what a