Nectar Wins National Startup Awards Scotland 2026: Hospitality, Tourism and Events StartUp of the Year

I want to start by saying what this article is not.

It is not a list of achievements. It is not a round of self-congratulation wrapped in false modesty. It is not a press release with a photo of a trophy and a quote from a founder about being humbled and grateful, even though I am both of those things and find them genuinely difficult to articulate without sounding like exactly the kind of thing I am trying not to write.

This is a thank you. A specific one, to specific people, and I will get to that in a moment.

But first, I want to tell you about a night in Glasgow a few years ago, because this story does not start with Nectar.

Glasgow, 2022

The National Startup Awards Scotland launched for the first time in 2022. Eirini entered WearYourSmile, the sustainable clothing brand Eirini had built from the ground up: handcrafted pieces, ethical production, a genuinely distinctive point of view on what fashion can mean when it is made with care rather than convenience. She made the finalists list. They went to Glasgow for the ceremony at SWG3. She sat in a room full of Scottish founders who had each built something from nothing, and she walked away with the Rising Star Award that night.

I was there with her that night. Its special to be surrounded by other people that are thriving to create businesses that make a difference. The room. The standard of the other businesses. The specific feeling of being judged on the merits of what you have built by people who understand what building something actually takes. That feeling, is worth far more than whether you win.

Coming back with Nectar

We entered Nectar into the National Startup Awards Scotland 2026 because Eirini runs our awards strategy. That is not a casual delegation. It is a deliberate one. She knows exactly what she is doing in this space, having been through the process with WearYourSmile, understanding how to position a business, how to frame a story for a judging panel, and how to enter the right categories with the right application. When Eirini decides we are entering something, the question is not whether to do it. It is how to do it well.

What none of us anticipated was winning.

The Hospitality, Tourism and Events category is not a quiet corner of the awards. It is one of the most competitive categories in the Scottish startup landscape, and for good reason: Scotland's hospitality industry is extraordinary, and the pool of businesses entering any award in this space reflects that. We knew the standard would be high. We submitted the application, described what Nectar is, and genuinely did not assume that the result would go our way.

Coming back to those same awards with Nectar, in a harder category, against more competition, and winning: that is not something I expected to be writing about. And the fact that it happened in the same period as the Great British Entrepreneur Awards shortlisting, at a national scale, from two independent directions simultaneously, is the thing that makes it genuinely difficult to process in real time.

Eirini knew what she was doing when she entered us. She was right, as she usually is about these things.

What the judges from the National Startup Awards Scotland 2026 said

The judges do not have to be generous with their reasoning. A lot of award panels announce a winner and leave it there. The National Startup Awards Scotland included a formal comment on each category winner, and I want to quote ours in full because it is the most honest external description of Nectar that has been written by someone with no obligation to be kind.

"Nectar stood out for creating a distinctive hospitality concept with impressive early customer response. In just five months, the business has become a popular destination on Broughton Street, achieved profitability, and built a strong reputation, supported by nearly 300 five-star reviews. The judges recognised a hospitality startup with strong execution, customer appeal and a clear understanding of experience, quality and brand. Judges' Choice winner."

There is a detail in that paragraph I want to sit with for a moment: five months. The judges assessed Nectar at five months of trading and found it worth recognising as the best hospitality startup in Scotland. Nectar opened in August 2024. Five months takes us to January 2025. The bar that was a year old before most people outside the immediate neighbourhood had heard of it was, apparently, already doing something worth noticing.

I did not know that at the time. Running a new venue in its first five months feels nothing like being the best anything. It feels like problem-solving at speed, like learning things you did not know you needed to know, like going to sleep tired in ways that are different to any kind of tired you have experienced before, and waking up the next day to do it again.

The judges saw something in that period that the people inside the venue were too close to see clearly. That is what external recognition does when it is done properly, and it is why entering these things matters beyond the result.

What proof of concept actually means

There is a phrase in business that gets used so often it has almost lost its meaning: proof of concept. The idea is that you have a hypothesis about something, you build the smallest version of it you can, and you test whether the hypothesis holds.

Nectar was a hypothesis. The hypothesis was that Edinburgh was missing a Greek-Mediterranean cocktail bar that took its drinks as seriously as its food, that had a genuine identity rooted in a specific culinary tradition rather than a generic Mediterranean theme, and that could build a loyal audience through quality, consistency, and the kind of hospitality that makes people feel looked after rather than processed.

The 300 five-star Google reviews are one form of proof. The tables that book regularly, the guests who have tried every cocktail on the menu and come back when it changes, the people who first heard about us through a friend and brought their parents and their colleagues and their anniversary reservation: these are other forms of proof. They are the proof that matters most to us on a daily basis, because they are specific and human and show up in the room rather than on a certificate.

But there is a particular value in external proof. In a room full of founders who are each trying to build something, being assessed by experienced entrepreneurs and investors who have no interest in your success or failure and arriving at the conclusion that you are doing something worth recognising: that is a different kind of confirmation. It comes from outside the bubble of daily service, and it arrives with the authority that comes from genuine independence of judgment.

Being shortlisted for the Great British Entrepreneur Awards while simultaneously winning the National Startup Awards Scotland is, to use a word I rarely reach for, exhilarating. Not because we needed either to believe in what we are building. But because having the external world confirm what you believed internally, at a national scale, from multiple directions simultaneously, is the kind of thing that does not happen often and deserves to be marked properly.

This belongs to everyone who has been here

I said at the beginning that this is a thank you, and I meant it.

The judges described Nectar as having "impressive early customer response." That customer response is you. The people who came in during the first weeks when the menu was still being refined and the team was still learning the rhythms of the room. The people who told their friends after the first visit and then came back with those friends. The people who left reviews not because we asked them to but because something about the evening was worth writing about. The regulars who greet the team by name and ask what is new on the menu and treat the bar like a place that belongs to them, which is exactly what we want it to feel like.

Margarita has been cooking food that earns the responses it earns because she cares about it deeply and constantly, fiercely, in ways that produce dishes that surprise people who thought they knew what Greek food tasted like. Panos has been building a cocktail programme that takes genuine creative risks, enters competitions, experiments with new techniques, and produces drinks that people remember. Eirini has been making the room feel like a place where people are welcomed rather than served. The wider team that has grown around the founding four has brought its own version of that same care to every service.

The award belongs to all of them. And it belongs to everyone who has walked through the door on Broughton Street and decided that Nectar was worth coming back to.

We are turning one in August. We are going to Glasgow in November for the Great British Entrepreneur Awards. We are doing this with a team that entered a room four years ago as WearYourSmile finalists and came home without a trophy but with something that turned out to matter more.

We are back. And this time, we brought Nectar with us.

Book a table at Nectar Bar and come and celebrate with us.

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