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 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

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

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 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

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

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