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

There is a particular kind of afternoon that Edinburgh does better than almost anywhere else. Not the hectic Saturday of tourist crowds on the Royal Mile or the purposeful Friday evening that has somewhere to be. Something quieter than both. The afternoon that belongs to nobody's plan in particular. The one that finds its own shape. It usually starts the same way. Someone is passing through. On their way into the city or on their way home from somewhere. They notice the warm

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 for a hen party. Not because it has the biggest clubs or the loudest bars, though it has both if that is what you are after. Because it has something more useful than that: a genuinely varied and high-quality hospitality scene compressed into a city small enough to walk across in twenty minutes. That concentration matters more than most people realise when they are planning a group evening. In Edinburgh you can have dinner in a Me

Private dining in Edinburgh tends to mean one of two things. A hotel function room where the carpet does not match the chairs and the food arrives under silver cloches from a kitchen you will never see. Or a curtained-off corner of a restaurant where you can still hear the table next to you ordering dessert. Nectar is neither of those things. When you hire a space at Nectar, you are hiring a proper cocktail bar and Greek kitchen on one of Edinburgh's most characterful indepen

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

Most visitors to Edinburgh spend their time on the Royal Mile, Princes Street and George Street. All three are worth your time. But if you want to understand what Edinburgh actually feels like to the people who live here, you need to come further down into the New Town and find Broughton Street. Broughton Street runs northeast from the heart of Edinburgh's Georgian New Town down towards Leith Walk, and it has a character that is entirely its own. Independent businesses, a str

There is a particular moment in every cocktail masterclass at Nectar that Panos talks about more than anything else. It is not when the first drink comes together. It is not when someone nails the technique on the first attempt or produces something that tastes better than they expected. It is the moment when someone who arrived genuinely convinced they would be the worst person in the room takes a sip of the cocktail they made, looks up, and laughs. That moment happens at al

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

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

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

Hire the back room or full venue at Nectar for private events in Edinburgh. Greek-Mediterranean food, handcrafted cocktails, from birthdays to corporate evenings.

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

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.