Founder Spotlight: Chris

If you have ever been to Nectar, there is a good chance you have asked me, or heard someone else ask me, where I am from. It comes up constantly, usually within the first few minutes of a conversation at the bar, and I understand why. The accent does not sit neatly anywhere, and neither, really, does the story behind how I ended up running a Greek-Mediterranean bar in Edinburgh in our Founder Spotlight.

Where I am actually from

I was born and raised in Zurich. My father is Czech, my mother is American. I have never actually lived in the United States, not for a single day, but I grew up with the accent anyway, shaped by my mother and by how she raised my brother and me. It is one of those things that confuses people until I explain it, and then makes complete sense once I do: a Swiss childhood, a Czech father, an American mother, and an accent that carries all three without quite belonging fully to any of them.

Zurich still shapes more of what happens at Nectar than most guests would guess. It is where I grew up drinking crème de cassis mixed with water out of old wine bottles, convinced I was drinking something grown-up. It is where a friendship with Alfred, going back to secondary school, eventually led to our first international bar takeover, at his venue, Dalí's. It is where a childhood summer, American Pie playing constantly and a house party in full swing, produced the drink that later became my entry into a national UK cocktail competition. Zurich is not somewhere I left behind when I moved to Edinburgh. It is a place that keeps showing up in the glass.

Before Nectar

Before any of this existed, I spent a long time building a career in marketing that I am genuinely proud of. Events, banking, finance, advertising, technology, I worked across a wide range of industries, promoting products and businesses in more contexts than I ever expected to when I started out. It was a good career, and I do not think of the years I spent in it as a detour on the way to something else. They were the actual training ground for what I am doing now.

I did not come from hospitality. I want to be honest about that, because it matters to how Nectar was built and how it continues to run. I had never worked a bar shift, never run a kitchen pass, never managed a service under real pressure before we opened. Everything I knew about running a business, I knew from the corporate world, and everything I knew about hospitality specifically, I learned from the people I chose to build Nectar with: Margarita in the kitchen, Panos behind the bar, Eirini on the floor. What I brought to the table was different, and I think that difference is part of why Nectar looks the way it does.

This is why I love running Nectar as much as I do. It is not simply a bar I happen to own. It is the place where every lesson from that corporate career finally gets applied to something I have a genuine stake in, something I built rather than something I was hired to build for someone else. The content strategy behind this blog, the way we think about brand, about story, about how a business actually communicates who it is: none of that came from hospitality. It came from a decade of learning how businesses grow, applied here, to a bar on Broughton Street, because I finally had the chance to use it on something that was mine.

Why the guest experience is the thing I actually care about

If you ask me what I am most passionate about at Nectar, it is not the cocktails, even though I have thrown myself into learning them properly, entering national competitions, and building my own relationship with technique and flavour over the past year. It is not even the food, as much as I am endlessly proud of what Margarita produces. It is the guest experience, specifically, and specifically the part of it that is invisible to most people until it is missing.

I think this comes directly from my marketing background rather than in spite of it. Marketing, at its best, is about understanding exactly what someone needs before they have fully articulated it themselves, and then delivering it in a way that feels natural rather than engineered. That is precisely what I try to do at Nectar, just translated into a physical room instead of a campaign. Noticing when a solo guest at the bar wants conversation and when they want to be left alone. Understanding that a birthday of two people needs a completely different kind of attention to a birthday of fifteen. Knowing that the difference between a good evening and a genuinely memorable one is rarely the food or the drink alone. It is the hundred small decisions made around them, decisions most guests never consciously register, that determine whether an evening becomes a memory or simply a meal.

This is the thread that runs through almost everything I have written about on this blog, whether I am talking about solo dining, birthday parties, or why we change the menu every three months. None of it is really about the mechanics. It is about the guest, and what a specific kind of evening actually requires of us to get right.

How I ended up in Scotland

I came to Edinburgh originally to study. What was meant to be a defined period turned into something else entirely, because the city got under my skin in a way I did not expect and have never quite been able to explain properly since. It does not hurt that, somewhere along the way, we bought a flat, and then a bar. Life happens in mysterious ways, and mine has apparently decided that Edinburgh is where it happens.

I have been here for nearly ten years now. Long enough that Scotland does not feel like somewhere I moved to anymore. It feels like where I am from, in the way that matters, even if the accent still tells a slightly different story. Watching the city receive Nectar the way it has over the past year, the reviews, the awards, the faces that keep coming back through the door, has been one of the most unexpected joys of building this business. Edinburgh did not have to embrace what we were trying to do. It did anyway.

The languages you will hear behind the bar

If you spend enough time at Nectar, you will hear me switch between languages without necessarily noticing I have done it. German, French, English, Czech, and Greek are the main ones. German and Swiss German from growing up in Zurich. French from the Swiss school system, where it is simply part of the curriculum whether you plan to use it later or not. English from my mother and from a career built largely in English-speaking business environments. Czech from my father. And Greek, which is the newest of the five, learned properly since opening a Greek-Mediterranean bar with people who speak it fluently and were patient enough to teach me as we went.

It is a strange collection of languages to carry into a single room on Broughton Street, but it suits what Nectar has become: a place built from several different backgrounds, several different traditions, brought together into something that feels, somehow, entirely coherent.

What I have learned in a year of doing this properly in a founder Spotlight

A year into running Nectar, the thing I keep coming back to is how much of what I thought I understood about hospitality before we opened turned out to be incomplete. I understood the business side of it, the marketing, the brand, the strategy. What I did not fully understand, until I was living it every night, was how much the guest experience depends on a thousand small human decisions that cannot be planned for in advance, only responded to in the moment, by people who genuinely care whether the person in front of them has a good evening.

I am still learning that. I suspect I will be learning it for as long as Nectar exists. But it is the part of this work I find most compelling, more than the cocktails, more than the awards, more than the competitions. Getting the guest experience right, consistently, for people who did not grow up in this industry the way I did not grow up in it either, is the thing I actually think about when I am not at the bar.

Book a table at Nectar Bar and ask me where I'm from. I promise the answer is more interesting than it initially sounds.

Opening hours Tuesday to Thursday: 5pm to 11pm Friday: 5pm to 1am Saturday: 12pm to 1am Sunday: 12pm to 11pm Monday: Closed