Edinburgh

Updated October 2026. This replaces our earlier hen party guide. If you are the one organising a hen party in Edinburgh, you already know the real job. It is not choosing the fun part. It is making sure eleven people with different budgets, appetites and energy levels all end up in the right place at the right time, and that the bride has a brilliant night without ever seeing the spreadsheet. I run Nectar, a Greek and Mediterranean cocktail bar and restaurant at 73 Broughton

Dates and details checked in October 2026. Christmas programmes change, so check the official pages linked below before you plan around a specific time. I should be honest about something before you read any further. Last Christmas, we were working, and we were not really around to enjoy the city. I did not get to wander through the market with a mulled drink in my hand. So I am not going to pretend I have a favourite chestnut stall or a secret route through the lights. What

Updated October 2026. Replaces our earlier pre theatre guide. A show night is a small piece of logistics disguised as a treat. You have a curtain time you cannot move, a table you have to leave on schedule, and a ten minute walk in whatever the Edinburgh weather has decided to do. The restaurant that gets this right is not always the one closest to the theatre. It is the one that understands you have somewhere to be, and understands the meaning of a pre theatre dinner at the

Updated October 2026. This guide replaces two earlier Broughton Street posts I wrote this year. They said much the same thing in different ways, so I have folded them into one and corrected what had changed. I have been on Broughton Street Edinburgh almost every day since we opened Nectar in August 2025. I walk it before service and I walk it after we close, which means I know it in daylight and I know it at one in the morning. I am also biased, and I will say so now, because

Updated October 2026. This guide replaces two earlier posts I wrote on Greek food in Edinburgh. They covered the same ground from slightly different angles, so I have combined them, corrected what had changed, and added a menu decoder. Greek food has a reputation problem in Britain that it does not deserve. For a lot of people it means a late night gyros, a tub of supermarket hummus, or one very good week on an island that they have been trying to recreate ever since. All of

Updated October 2026. This replaces our earlier, shorter version. You can usually tell within about ten minutes whether a cocktail bar is any good. Not from the awards on the wall or the number of followers it has, but from a handful of small things that are very hard to fake. I run Nectar, a Greek and Mediterranean cocktail bar and restaurant at 73 Broughton Street. I have a stake in this question, so read what follows with that in mind. But I also drink in other people's ba

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every August, Edinburgh becomes a different city. The population roughly doubles. Every spare room in a ten-mile radius is rented out to a comedian, a theatre troupe, or a solo performer who has been working on their show for two years and is quietly terrified. The Royal Mile turns into a parade of flyering, shouting, singing and general theatrical desperation. Cowgate stays open until four in the morning. And scattered across every church hall, basement, converted car park a

A good friend of mine visited Nectar for the first time not long ago. He had come up from London for the weekend and we had arranged to meet on a Friday evening. He arrived, looked around at the tables filling up, ordered a drink, and turned to me with a slightly puzzled expression. It feels like people gather here for drinks after work, he said. Just like pub culture in London. Is that the thing everywhere? I had to smile. Some days it is, some days it is not. But the honest

Edinburgh is one of the best cities in the UK to eat in right now. I say that as someone who has lived here long enough to have opinions and eaten in enough places to back them up. The restaurant scene has changed enormously in the last few years, with independent venues doing genuinely ambitious work sitting alongside long-established institutions that have earned their reputation across decades. There are hundreds of places to choose from. This is not a comprehensive list.

When people find out that half of our menu at Nectar is vegetarian or vegan, the reaction is usually some version of pleasant surprise. A Mediterranean gastro bar that entered the Edinburgh scene leading with cocktails and Greek sharing plates does not immediately read as a venue that takes plant-based dining seriously. But that surprise says more about the assumptions people bring to Mediterranean food than it does about the food itself. Because in the Greek kitchen, vegetab

Edinburgh has a weekend reputation that is entirely justified. The city fills up on Friday and Saturday with visitors, locals out for special occasions, and the kind of energy that makes it one of the best nights out in the UK. Everyone knows about that version of Edinburgh. What fewer people talk about is how good this city can be on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday evening. Quieter, more personal, easier to get a table, and often significantly better value. The venues that

Edinburgh is one of those cities that almost does the work for you when it comes to romance. The cobblestones, the candlelit closes, the way the castle catches the last of the light on a clear evening. Even a quiet Tuesday can feel like a special occasion if you end up in the right place. I have spent the last eight months running Nectar on Broughton Street, and before that several years eating and drinking my way through this city with genuine curiosity. I know what makes an