Greek and Mediterranean Food in Edinburgh: Where to Find the Real Thing

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 or adapted way, but in the way that happens when people who grew up cooking a particular food open a restaurant and cook it the way they actually know how to cook it.

Edinburgh has excellent Indian restaurants that cook for people who know Indian food rather than for people who are encountering it for the first time. It has Italian cooking that reflects specific regional traditions rather than a generic pasta-and-pizza template. It has Thai, Japanese, Lebanese, and Spanish restaurants run by people for whom these are not foreign cuisines but simply the food they grew up eating. That authenticity of origin matters in a way that is immediately apparent when you eat somewhere that has it versus somewhere that does not.

Greek and Mediterranean food in Edinburgh sits firmly in this category. The scene is smaller than some of the city's other international cuisines and it receives less press coverage than it deserves. But when it is good, it is genuinely good, and finding the right places is the whole thing.

This is a guide to doing that.

What Greek food actually is

Before getting into venues, it is worth being precise about what Greek food is, because the version most people in Scotland have encountered does not always give an accurate picture of the tradition at its best.

Greek cuisine has been documented since antiquity. The first known cookbook in any culture was written by the Greek poet Archestratos in the fourth century BC, and what he described bears a recognisable relationship to what appears on Greek tables today. The foundation has always been the same: olive oil, wheat, wine, fresh vegetables, seafood, and meat used with consideration rather than abundance. The Mediterranean diet, of which Greek food is the primary expression, was added to UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2013, not for its nutritional credentials alone but for its cultural significance as a way of eating that is fundamentally communal, seasonal, and rooted in a specific relationship with the land.

What distinguishes Greek food from the broader Mediterranean category is its philosophy of restraint. The cooking is not trying to be complex. It is trying to be good. The emphasis is on finding the best possible ingredient and doing only what is necessary to reveal what that ingredient already is. Olive oil, lemon, garlic, fresh herbs, direct heat: these are the tools of a kitchen that trusts its ingredients rather than transforming them. That approach is demanding in a way that is invisible to the person eating, because there is nowhere to hide. A souvlaki is either marinated properly, grilled correctly, and served at the right moment, or it falls short. The simplicity is not an absence of skill. It is the evidence of it.

Understanding that philosophy helps explain why the best Greek food tends to come from kitchens where the cook grew up with it rather than kitchens that learned it as a category.

The Edinburgh venues worth your time

Fava

Fava on Morrison Street is the anchor of Edinburgh's Greek dining scene and has been for several years. It operates as a proper Greek mezze restaurant with a menu that covers the genuine range of what Greek cooking produces: hot and cold meze, grilled meats, seafood, vegetarian dishes, and a Greek wine list that reflects genuine knowledge of what Greece actually makes. The reviews across multiple platforms are consistently strong and the kitchen produces food that tastes like it comes from somewhere specific. If you want a traditional Greek restaurant experience in Edinburgh, this is the reference point.

Ella

Ella at 134-136 Leith Walk is a newer addition to the Edinburgh Greek scene and brings the meze and grill format to one of the city's most characterful stretches of road. The focus is on fresh tapas, meze and grill dishes built around Greek culinary tradition, with a team that describes the experience as something that should feel like gathering with family. That warmth is what characterises the best Greek hospitality, and from what Ella describes on its own terms it is clearly the intention here. The location on Leith Walk puts it in good company with the neighbourhood's broader international dining offer.

Spitaki

Spitaki at 133 East Claremont Street is a Greek taverna in the truest sense of the word. The menu covers traditional dishes and small plates, gigantes, bougiourti, prawn saganaki, spanakorizo, homemade dips, with an approach that prioritises authenticity over ambition. The house wine from Greece is genuinely good value and the atmosphere has the unhurried warmth that Edinburgh's more formal restaurants rarely produce. The reviews describe it consistently as feeling like a favourite Greek holiday restaurant, which is a higher compliment than it might initially sound. Good Greek taverna cooking is not simple to find in the UK and Spitaki does it well.

Nixos Greek Street Food

Nixos in Portobello is doing something completely different to the restaurants above, and it is doing it at the level it should be done. A dedicated Greek street food operation on Portobello High Street, Nixos serves souvlaki and gyros with a 4.8 Google rating and 188 reviews that consistently describe the food as rivalling what you would find in Greece itself. For the kind of Greek food that most Greeks eat most of the time, fast, fresh, properly seasoned, served without pretension, Nixos is the answer. It also operates delivery across the city, which is worth knowing.

Nectar Bar

I should declare my interest clearly: Nectar is our restaurant. But I can describe honestly what we do and why it occupies a different position in the Edinburgh Greek food landscape to the venues above.

We are a Greek-Mediterranean cocktail bar and sharing plates kitchen on Broughton Street. The food comes from Margarita's kitchen and is rooted in the same Greek culinary philosophy described above: freshness, restraint, trust in the ingredient. The chicken skewer is marinated properly and grilled over direct heat, nothing more. The grilled halloumi arrives golden and yielding with a dark forest fruit chutney that is the right pairing rather than an obvious one. The cheese filo pastry with honey and sesame is the dish I recommend to every table and the one that most consistently produces the reaction it should. The platters are built around generosity rather than presentation. The food is genuinely Greek in its thinking even where it makes its own specific choices.

What makes Nectar different from every other venue in this category in Edinburgh is the combination it brings together. Margarita's kitchen sits alongside a cocktail programme built on Greek and Mediterranean flavour, using techniques that Nectar develops and enters into competition with: we reached the Scotland Finals of the Bumbu Originals and the advanced rounds of the Patron Margarita Challenge in our first year. And the wine list is anchored by Greek varietals chosen because they are the right wines for the food, the Assyrtiko Sauvignon Blanc and the Xinomavro Syrah Merlot from the Apeiron producer in Macedonia, not because they fill a category on the list.

There is no other venue in Scotland doing this specific combination. That is not a criticism of anyone else. It is simply an observation about what Nectar is trying to be and what it currently is.

Greek wine: the part of this scene most worth exploring

One aspect of Greek and Mediterranean food in Edinburgh that consistently goes underexplored is the wine. Most people who eat Greek food in Scotland have never tried a genuinely good Greek wine alongside it, and most Greek restaurants in the city do not carry lists that make it easy to do so.

This matters because Greek wine and Greek food grew up together in the same soil over the same thousands of years. The pairing logic is not constructed. An Assyrtiko from Santorini alongside grilled fish or halloumi makes both taste more like themselves. A Xinomavro from Macedonia alongside a meat platter provides the structural support the food needs in a way that a more generic red cannot. The Assyrtiko is Greece's most serious white grape: mineral-driven, high acid, bone dry, with a precision that cuts through richness and lifts everything alongside it. Xinomavro is the red equivalent: structured, aromatic, demanding of food, and capable of a complexity that consistently surprises people who have never encountered it.

If you want to understand what Greek wine actually is, the most efficient way to do it in Edinburgh is to sit at the Nectar Bar and let us open both bottles. We will tell you what you are drinking and why it belongs on the table in front of you.

Finding the right places

The honest summary of Edinburgh's Greek and Mediterranean food scene is that it is not large and it is not loud. It does not generate the kind of critical attention that the city's tasting menu restaurants attract, and it does not have the media momentum of the newer Asian small plates wave. But it has something that some of the more fashionable categories do not: kitchens run by people who grew up with this food and cook it because it is genuinely theirs.

That is the thing that makes the difference between food that is well-executed and food that is actually good. Edinburgh has several Greek and Mediterranean venues that fall on the right side of that line. Finding them is what this guide is for.

Book a table at Nectar Bar and start with the cheese filo pastry.

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

Nectar Bar, 73 Broughton Street, Edinburgh EH1 3RJ