Stories from Nectar Bar Edinburgh

Yes, we do vouchers at Nectar. It is one of the most straightforward things we offer, and one of my favourite things to be asked about, for a reason that has nothing to do with the transaction itself. You decide the total value. You decide what we write on it. And you decide whether you want it as a physical voucher or an electronic one. That is genuinely the whole process, and it is deliberately simple, because the actual point of a voucher has very little to do with the mec

This was our second Edinburgh Fringe at Nectar, and it looked almost nothing like the first. Nectar's birthday falls on 1 August, which means our first Fringe and our first year of existing at all began in the same breath. That timing made last year genuinely hectic in a way I don't think we fully appreciated until we had a second Fringe to compare it against. We opened at lunchtime and stayed open until 1am, every single day, convinced we had the energy and the capacity to s

Here is the first thing worth knowing about fava, and it is the thing that confuses almost everyone the first time they encounter it: there are no fava beans in it. In Greek, fava refers to yellow split peas, not the broad beans that the word fava means in English. The dish is a thick, smooth, golden purée made from those split peas, slow-cooked with onion until they break down completely, then blended with olive oil and lemon into something that sits somewhere between a dip,

Edinburgh is one of the most walkable cities in Britain, and I mean that in a specific way rather than as a generic compliment. You can genuinely walk almost anywhere in it, if you are prepared to. From the Meadows to the foot of Leith is roughly an hour on foot, and that distance is entirely doable if the mood takes you. The real question is not whether you can walk it. It is whether what you are looking for is somewhere along the way. That question is the whole point of thi

Every menu change at Nectar involves a tasting session that most guests never know about. When we are considering a new wine for the list, our supplier brings samples. Several bottles, sometimes more, representing different options across the category we are trying to fill. We open them, we taste them alongside the food they are intended for, and we make a decision. The process is not complicated, but it is never purely internal. We invite guests who are in the bar at the tim

A guest told me something once that I have not stopped thinking about since. They said that finding a Malbec that is actually French is uncommon, and that if you do find one, it has a story behind it worth asking about. I did not know at the time how right they were. Most people who order a Malbec anywhere in the world are drinking something from Argentina, and most people, understandably, assume that is simply where the grape comes from. It is not. Malbec is French. It was n

Everyone asks whether Edinburgh changes after the Fringe. The honest answer is that it gets less hectic, but the city itself does not go quiet. That is a misunderstanding of what Edinburgh is. The Fringe brings an extraordinary concentration of energy to every street and every room for three and a half weeks in August, and when it ends there is a very specific feeling in the city, not deflation exactly, but relief. The relief of a city that has been hosting something enormous

It has been a bit overwhelming lately. A few months ago, being shortlisted for the Great British Entrepreneur Awards felt like the highest thing we could reasonably have hoped for in our first year. Since then, we have been named Startup of the Year by the National Startup Awards. We have made a national final with Franklin and Sons, taking place in London. And this week we got the call that Nectar has been shortlisted for New Bar of the Year at the Scottish Bar and Pub Award

We have written about cocktail competitions before on this blog. This one was probably the biggest thing that has happened to Nectar's drinks programme so far, and I want to write about it honestly, because the honest version is more useful than the version where everything goes well. I did not place in the top three. But before I get to that, I want to be clear about the part I am genuinely, deeply proud of, because it is easy for a loss at the final to overshadow everything

On Wednesday 30 September 2026, Panos and I will leave Broughton Street for one night. Nectar Bar will have a takeover of Dalí's Bar in Zurich, and I want to tell you exactly why this is happening, because the reason is more personal than most bar takeover announcements tend to be. Alfred, the owner of Dalis Zurich Alfred and I grew up together in Zurich. Secondary school, the particular kind of friendship that forms when you are young and slightly reckless and convinced that

We get this question more than almost any other at the bar. Do you have a dry white wine? The honest answer is yes, several, and most of the whites on the Nectar list are technically dry. But over the course of the first year I have understood what this question actually means, and it is not a question about sugar content or winemaking technique. It is a question about feeling. The person asking it wants something light, crisp, clean, and easy to drink. Something that feels l

There is a particular smell that I associate with summer in the Mediterranean, and it involves a grill. Not a gas grill. A proper charcoal grill, somewhere outside, with the kind of heat underneath it that takes time to build. And on that grill, at some point, zucchini. Sliced open lengthways, brushed with olive oil, seasoned with salt and dried oregano, placed directly on the bars and left to char at the edges while the inside softens and sweetens in a way that nothing else

I want to tell you about the most frustrating moment in the development of the Nectar cocktail menu. We were in the final days before opening. One cocktail still needed to be finalised, the one that would pair with the prawns that were on our opening menu at the time. We had been working across multiple drinks, Panos and I, running infusions, tasting, adjusting, the way you are supposed to develop a cocktail. I had spent weeks getting to the point where I understood the logic

When I look back at the photographs and videos from the very first days of Nectar Edinburgh in Year One, I feel something that takes a moment to identify properly. It is not nostalgia exactly, though there is some of that. It is more like the specific feeling of looking at a version of yourself that was trying extremely hard at something it did not fully understand yet. The energy in those early images is obvious. The uncertainty, in retrospect, is equally obvious, even if no

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