Nectar Has Been Shortlisted for the Great British Entrepreneur Awards 2026

We enter a lot of competitions at Nectar.

Cocktail competitions, food competitions, business awards. Some of them we talk about openly. Most of them we keep to ourselves, not because we are secretive about the process, but because we genuinely do not believe that winning an award is a reason for someone to book a table at Nectar. You should come because the food is worth eating and the cocktails are worth drinking, not because we placed in a competition you have never heard of.

The competitions we enter are, for us, primarily about one thing: measuring ourselves against the best in our category and building relationships with equally ambitious people. This was a principle Eirini applied when she founded WearYourSmile, the retail venture she built before Nectar, and the network and perspective she gained from that process shaped the way all of us think about competition now. You do not enter to win a trophy. You enter to understand where you stand, to meet people who push you further, and to come back from the experience with a clearer picture of what needs to improve.

The Great British Entrepreneur Awards are different though. This one we are talking about.

What the awards actually are

The Great British Entrepreneur Awards were established in 2012 and have built a remarkable reputation for spotting the next household names before anyone else does. They receive around 5,000 applications annually and have been described as the Grammys of Entrepreneurship, celebrating incredible stories of passion, tenacity, courage, innovation and disruption from entrepreneurs running businesses of all sizes and at all stages.

The description was originally given by Steven Bartlett, a past winner who went on to become host of The Diary of a CEO, one of Europe's most listened-to podcasts, and a Dragon on Dragons' Den. I have listened to that podcast more times than I can count, its my daily ritual on my way to work. The thinking in it informs how I approach building Nectar every day, which makes the connection to this award feel less coincidental than it might otherwise look.

Daniel Priestley, entrepreneur, bestselling author, and founder of Dent and ScoreApp, sits on the judging panel and was inducted into the GBEA Hall of Fame in 2025. His work, particularly around becoming a Key Person of Influence in your market, is something I have read, applied, and disagreed with productively in equal measure. The idea of being judged in any capacity by people whose thinking you respect is a specific kind of motivation that a standard industry award does not produce.

The 2026 ceremony takes place on Monday 16th November at Grosvenor House on Park Lane, bringing together over 1,500 entrepreneurs, investors, business leaders and media for a black-tie evening. The whole Nectar team will be there.

Consumer Entrepreneur of the Year

The category we have been shortlisted for is Consumer Entrepreneur of the Year, which recognises entrepreneurs building businesses that serve consumers directly with a distinctive product or experience. The category sits alongside Technology Entrepreneur of the Year, Young Entrepreneur of the Year, and more than twenty others spanning every sector and region of the UK. The standard of the competition across all categories is genuinely high. Previous overall winners have included Julie Deane MBE, founder of the Cambridge Satchel Company, James Watt, co-founder of BrewDog, and Alexander Solomou, founder of LadBible.

Being shortlisted at this level in our first full year of trading is not something we took for granted when we entered. Nectar opened in August 2025 on Broughton Street in Edinburgh with a team of people who had never run a hospitality business before. Panos had the bartending experience and the creative vision for the cocktail programme. Margarita had spent her career cooking the food that now comes out of this kitchen. Eirini brought the operational warmth and the customer-facing expertise that makes the room feel the way it does. I came from marketing and advertising with no hospitality background and bringing the business basics to the team.

That combination, genuinely, is what is on the shortlist. Not a polished hospitality group with years of industry experience behind it. A team of people who believed in a specific concept, opened it on one of Edinburgh's best independent streets, and built it into something that 290+ guests have given five-star Google reviews to in just over a year.

Why this one is different

Most awards that hospitality businesses enter are assessed by industry judges who understand the specific pressures of running a kitchen or a bar. The GBEA is different in scope. It sits across every industry, assessed by entrepreneurs and investors who are looking at the fundamentals of how a business is built and run: the story behind it, the clarity of the concept, the ambition of the people leading it, and the evidence that it is working.

Being shortlisted in that context, against businesses from across the UK and across every sector, means something that a hospitality-specific award does not. It is an assessment of Nectar as a business rather than as a bar, and the distinction matters to us.

We have also made a deliberate choice to approach Nectar as a business that happens to be in hospitality rather than a hospitality business trying to apply business thinking retroactively. The blog you are currently reading is part of that: we are running a content strategy that very few independent hospitality venues in the UK are attempting, because we believe that the tools and approaches being used by the most ambitious businesses in other industries are applicable here. The shortlisting suggests that perspective is worth something.

What happens next

The ceremony is in November at Grosvenor House in London, where over 1,500 entrepreneurs, investors and business leaders gather to celebrate the UK's most outstanding founders across the award categories and ten regions. We will be there as a team, at a black-tie ceremony, in a room full of people we want to be compared to. Win or not, that evening is worth attending.

If we win, you will hear about it. If we do not, you will hear about that too, because the honest account of building a business in public is something we have always preferred over the curated version of it.

What we know right now is that we have been shortlisted for one of the most prestigious entrepreneurship awards in the country in our first year of trading, in a category judged by some of the most respected business minds in the UK, competing against businesses from across the entire country. For a team that opened on Broughton Street fourteen months ago with no hospitality experience and a strong opinion about what Edinburgh was missing, we will take that.

We will see you at Grosvenor House in November.

In the meantime, book a table at Nectar Bar. Come because the food and drinks are worth it. That has always been the point.

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