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

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

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