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

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

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

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

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

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

My father visits Edinburgh fairly regularly. Every time he does, we end up at Nectar, which is as it should be. He sits at the bar, catches up with the team, and then does the thing that still makes me laugh every single time: he orders a cocktail. This is a man who almost exclusively drinks wine and beer. He is Czech, which means he was raised on some of the finest lager in the world, in a country that takes its brewing with a seriousness that most nations reserve for things

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

There is a particular kind of Edinburgh evening that does not get written about enough. It starts with a table on Broughton Street sometime around half past five. A drink while you look at the menu. Food that arrives at the right pace and leaves you satisfied but not heavy. A walk up the hill to the Playhouse in time to find your seats without rushing. Two hours of something that stays with you. And then, if the evening is going well, the walk back down again to somewhere war

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

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