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 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

Some dishes you know are going to become a favourite the first time you taste them. Tigania Pan fried Pork was one of those for me. It was on our very first menu at Nectar, back before any of us knew whether the concept was going to work. I remember eating it for the first time and thinking, quite plainly, that I could not imagine ever getting sick of this kind of food. A year and a half later, that has held completely true. It has been off the menu for a while now, deliberat

Here is the first thing worth knowing about fava, and it is the thing that confuses almost everyone the first time they encounter it: there are no fava beans in it. In Greek, fava refers to yellow split peas, not the broad beans that the word fava means in English. The dish is a thick, smooth, golden purée made from those split peas, slow-cooked with onion until they break down completely, then blended with olive oil and lemon into something that sits somewhere between a dip,

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

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

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

There is a moment that happens at Nectar fairly regularly with this wine. Someone is ordering a bottle, usually because they have asked what goes well with the meat platter and I have pointed them toward the Xinomavro. The bottle arrives at the table. I open it and pour the first glass. They take a sip, pause slightly, and then look at the wine with a different kind of attention. Not confusion exactly. More like recalibration. They were expecting something, and this is someth

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

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

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