Food in Edinburgh

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

I should be upfront about something before we get into this. The platters are our most ordered items. By a significant margin. And I have a slightly complicated relationship with that fact, because my honest opinion is that the best way to eat at Nectar is not to order a platter at all. It is to order five or six individual dishes, share everything across the table, and let the meal develop in the way that Greek sharing food is really designed to do. But most of our guests wo

I have been on Broughton Street every day for the better part of a year. I walk it in the morning before we open, I walk it late at night after we close, and I have eaten and drunk my way along almost every stretch of it in between. That gives me a reasonably strong opinion about what makes it one of the most interesting streets in Edinburgh for food and drink, and an equally strong opinion about what it is not. It is not the Royal Mile. It is not a tourist route, not a desti

If you have ever bitten into a piece of cold halloumi and felt that curious, almost musical squeak against your teeth, you already know that this is not a normal cheese. It announces itself differently. It behaves differently. And when it is grilled and served hot, it transforms into something that is very difficult to stop eating. Halloumi is one of my favourite things on the Nectar menu, and I say that as someone who has eaten more of it than is probably reasonable. There i

One of the questions we get asked most often is how we decide what goes on the menu. The honest answer is that the menu is never quite decided. It is always in the process of becoming something slightly better than it was. Every three months we reprint. Every month we run a special. Every week something new is being tried behind the bar or tested in the kitchen, quietly and without announcement, waiting to see whether it is good enough to earn its place in front of a guest. T

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

There are dishes on a menu that you design, and there are dishes that arrive fully formed from somewhere older than the restaurant itself. Our Spinach and Leek Pitta belongs firmly in the second category. It did not come from a recipe book, a food trend, or a conversation about what might work well on a sharing plate menu. It came from Margarita's family, from decades of preparation in Greek kitchens, and from a tradition that predates Nectar by several generations. This is t

There are dishes on a menu that you eat and enjoy. And then there are dishes that you find yourself thinking about on the way home, that come to mind when the weather turns cold and grey, that you order first on a return visit without looking at anything else. Prawn Saganaki is the second kind. It has quietly become one of the most talked-about dishes at Nectar, and the more time passes, the more I understand why. What Saganaki Actually Means The word saganaki does not refer

Sharing plates have become one of the most common formats in modern restaurant dining, and yet they still manage to confuse people more than almost any other way of eating out. The questions are always the same. How many dishes do we need? Do they all arrive at once? What if one person wants something the other does not? Is this going to be enough food? Should I be building a starter, a main and a dessert in my head, or is this something else entirely? These are completely re

Greek food has a reputation problem in the UK that it does not entirely deserve. For a lot of people, the reference points are the same. A chicken gyros from a late-night takeaway, a bowl of hummus on a supermarket shelf, maybe a taverna meal from a holiday in Crete fifteen years ago. None of those things are bad. But none of them are the full picture either. Authentic Greek cooking is one of the most underrepresented cuisines in British cities, considering how rich and varie

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

We have been open for almost a year now. In that time I have had the opportunity to eat this dish every single day. And I am still not bored of it. That says something. When you are surrounded by food constantly, familiarity tends to flatten things. Dishes you loved in the first month start to feel like furniture. You stop tasting them properly and start seeing them as items on a list. The cheese filo pastry has never done that to me. Every time it comes out of the kitchen I

There is a dish on our menu that I did not expect to become the thing people come back for most consistently. Not the cocktails, not the platters, not the flagship Tzatziki Martini that gets photographed and talked about more than anything else we serve. The chicken skewer. It is our bestseller. Has been for most of the time we have been open. And the more I think about why, the more it makes sense, because a great chicken skewer is one of the most deceptively difficult thing

I did not grow up eating Greek food. I grew up in Zurich, in a household where the cooking was good but Swiss and Central European in its character: hearty, precise, built around the kind of ingredients that suit a landlocked country with cold winters. Mediterranean cooking was something I encountered on holidays, in restaurants, at other people's tables. It was always appealing but it felt like it belonged to somewhere else. Then I moved to Edinburgh, met Panos and Margarita

When a table is filled with shared plates, choosing the right wine can feel more complicated than it needs to be. At Nectar, food is designed to be ordered generously and enjoyed together. That means your table will often feature vegetables, meat, fish and cheese all at once. Rather than trying to find a wine that perfectly matches everything, we recommend a simpler and far more enjoyable approach. Start by deciding which dish you want to be the focus , and let that lead your

At Nectar, food is meant to be shared. Our menu is designed to encourage conversation, variety and enjoyment around the table, rather than following the traditional structure of starters and mains. If this is your first visit, here is the easiest way to approach ordering and make the most of the experience. A Menu Built for Everyone at the Table One of the first things you will notice is how the menu is laid out. On the left-hand side , you will find vegan and vegetarian dish

Greek food has a reputation problem in the UK, and the problem is familiarity. Most people have a fixed image of what Greek food is. A gyros from a late-night takeaway. A Greek salad with a block of feta. Hummus from a supermarket shelf. Maybe a taverna meal from a holiday in Rhodes fifteen years ago, where the view was better than the octopus and the house wine arrived in a carafe without a label. None of those things are wrong. Some of them are genuinely good. But they repr

Nectar has been open on Broughton Street for 6 months now, offering specialised cocktails and greek food.