Nectar x Dalí's: Our First Bar Takeover, and Why It Is Happening in Zurich

On Wednesday 30 September 2026, Panos and I will leave Broughton Street for one night.

Nectar Bar will have a takeover of Dalí's Bar in Zurich, and I want to tell you exactly why this is happening, because the reason is more personal than most bar takeover announcements tend to be.

Alfred, the owner of Dalis Zurich

Alfred and I grew up together in Zurich. Secondary school, the particular kind of friendship that forms when you are young and slightly reckless and convinced that your specific group of people is the most interesting one in the world. We got into trouble together in the way that close friends do, in ways that seem significantly funnier in retrospect than they did at the time. We were inseparable for years.

Then life did what life does. I went into marketing. Alfred went into hospitality school. We stayed close but our paths diverged in the way that paths diverge when people move through their twenties in different directions with different pressures and different priorities.

Years later, around the same time I was opening Nectar on Broughton Street in Edinburgh, Alfred told me he was looking to open his own place in Zurich. The timing was not coincidental in any meaningful sense. It was simply two people from the same background, with the same instincts about what makes a good room, arriving at the same decision at roughly the same moment from opposite sides of Europe.

The moment he told me, my mind went to a takeover. Immediately. Before he had even finished describing what he was planning.

What a bar takeover is

A bar takeover is when a bar from one city visits a hosting bar in another, bringing their own drinks and their own story to a room that their hosts have filled with guests.

It serves both parties differently and well. The hosting bar demonstrates that it can fill a venue, curate an experience, and give a visiting concept a platform worthy of the effort it takes to travel for one. The visiting bar gains something that local reputation alone cannot generate: exposure in a different city, to a different audience, with a different context around everything they bring.

The brands involved benefit from the same logic. Showing a product to a room that has specifically gathered to taste it is a different proposition to shelf presence or social media, and the best brand partnerships at takeovers are the ones where the product genuinely earns its place in the evening rather than simply appearing on the back bar.

Nectar x Dalí's has all of that. And then it has something else.

Why Zurich specifically

Zurich is my home. I left it to build something in Edinburgh, and the distance from that city has given me a perspective on it that proximity never does. You understand what a place means to you more clearly from somewhere else than you do when you are inside it.

I have a network in Zurich that I built across a childhood and an early adulthood, the kind of network that does not require maintenance because the connections were formed before everyone became too busy to maintain things. People I grew up with. Friends of friends. Family. The specific social web of a city you come from rather than a city you chose.

Since opening Nectar, I have received a lot of messages from people in Zurich wanting to know how things are going in Scotland, what we are building, what the bar is like. Those messages have always touched something in me that is difficult to describe precisely: the combination of pride and distance that comes with having left somewhere you love to build something somewhere else.

The takeover on 30 September is the answer to all of those messages. Come and see what we built. We are bringing it to you.

The brands on the night

Three partners are supporting the evening, each of them chosen because they belong at a night like this rather than simply because they wanted the placement.

Bumbu Rum is the spirit that brought Nectar to a national competition final in its first year. We entered the Bumbu Originals Scotland Finals with a cocktail built around this specific rum, and the process of developing that cocktail changed how the team thinks about rum-forward builds. Bumbu is based on the original recipe created by 16th and 17th century sailors of the West Indies, who blended native Caribbean ingredients into their rum. It is a rich, complex spirit with a warmth and depth that suits being shown off in front of a room that has come specifically to discover something.

The Deacon is the Scotch whisky that brings Scotland into the room in a very specific way. In Scots language, a Deacon is an adept and proficient master tradesman, and the whisky is an homage to master craftspeople, whatever their trade may be. Peaty Islay single malts and bonfire-smoky mainland single malts combine in the blend to create a balance of smoke and sweetness that is immediately recognisable as Scottish without being predictable. Bringing a Scotch whisky to Zurich is the most direct way of carrying Edinburgh into the room, and The Deacon is the bottle that makes that statement with the right combination of character and approachability.

Thomas Henry is the mixer brand that completes the evening. A premium Berlin-based mixer company whose products are designed for cocktail use rather than adapted for it, Thomas Henry represents the kind of craft approach to what goes alongside spirits that the Nectar bar programme has always respected. The right mixer in the right cocktail is as important as the spirit itself, and Thomas Henry understands that.

What the night looks like

Dalí's Bar on Wednesday 30 September. The Nectar team bringing Scottish craft cocktails to a Swiss room. Bumbu, The Deacon, and Thomas Henry supporting the evening. Alfred hosting on his home territory.

And somewhere in that room, a group of people who have known each other since secondary school in Zurich, gathering around a bar for the first time in years, because a bar takeover became the most natural reason in the world to do it.

I have been looking forward to this since the moment I had the idea. I am still looking forward to it now.

If you are in Zurich on Wednesday 30 September, come to Dalí's Bar, for Nectar Bars Zurich takeover. Tell Alfred that Chris sent you.

And if you are in Edinburgh and want to know what the Nectar team is like when we are operating somewhere we have never operated before, watch the Instagram. We will be documenting every part of it.

Follow us at @nectarbar.edi and we will see you either in Zurich or back on Broughton Street the following week.

Book a table at Nectar Bar Edinburgh for when we are back.

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