One Year of Nectar Edinburgh: What We Got Wrong, What We Got Right, and What Comes Next

When I look back at the photographs and videos from the very first days of Nectar Edinburgh in Year One, I feel something that takes a moment to identify properly.

It is not nostalgia exactly, though there is some of that. It is more like the specific feeling of looking at a version of yourself that was trying extremely hard at something it did not fully understand yet. The energy in those early images is obvious. The uncertainty, in retrospect, is equally obvious, even if none of us would have admitted it at the time.

We opened on Broughton Street in August 2024. One year later, we have won the National Startup Awards Scotland in the Hospitality, Tourism and Events category. We have been shortlisted for the Great British Entrepreneur Awards in the Consumer Entrepreneur of the Year category, alongside businesses from across the entire country. We have over 300 five-star Google reviews. We have a team that has grown, a menu that has evolved through multiple cycles, a cocktail programme that has entered and placed in national competitions, and a room full of regulars who feel at home in a space that did not exist twelve months ago.

None of that is how I want to measure the first year. The milestones are real and they matter. But they are not the story. The story is everything that happened between the photographs.

What we got wrong at the start at Nectar Edinburgh in Year One

When I look at how my thinking has shifted over the course of this year, the most significant change is the simplest one.

In the early days, I was consumed by operational detail in a way that, in retrospect, reflected a misunderstanding about what building a business actually involves. When do suppliers arrive? What are the best rates? What system do we use for this, and how do we make sure that process is already in place?

The problem with that thinking is the assumption embedded in it: that systems should already exist when you open, that the infrastructure of a working business is something you discover rather than something you build. It is not. When you open a venue, nothing is pre-existing. Every process, every relationship, every decision about how something works needs to be discussed, agreed, documented, and then revised when the first version turns out to be wrong.

I knew this intellectually before we opened. I did not understand it in practice until we were inside the first month of service, managing a kitchen, a bar, a front of house team, supplier relationships, booking systems, and a room full of guests, all simultaneously, all for the first time.

What I understand now, that I did not understand then, is that the operational detail matters but it is not the point. The point is three things and only three things: serve great food, create great drinks, and build an atmosphere that people genuinely want to be inside. If you can do those three things consistently, the systems around them will develop in service of something real. If you cannot do those three things, no amount of operational efficiency produces a business worth running.

That shift in perspective is the most important thing the first year taught me.

Margarita and the kitchen

I want to say something about Margarita that I find genuinely difficult to articulate without either underselling it or tipping into the kind of sentiment that she would absolutely not appreciate.

The first year of Nectar has been manageable in large part because of what comes out of the kitchen. And what comes out of the kitchen is the product of someone who understands food at a level that makes the day-to-day running of a restaurant feel like it is on solid ground rather than uncertain terrain. The menus she has developed, the way she has responded to what our guests respond to, the continuous desire to change and improve and push the food into territory that is more demanding and more rewarding: all of it has given Nectar a culinary identity that I do not think any of us fully anticipated when we opened.

The feedback we receive about the food is consistent in a way that is rare. Not just positive, which would be easy to explain as people being polite, but specific. Guests come back and ask for the cheese filo pastry by name. They ask whether the chicken skewer is still on the menu. They notice when something new has arrived and want to know the story behind it. That level of engagement with a kitchen's output is not something you can manufacture through good service or a well-designed room. It comes from food that is genuinely worth that level of attention.

Margarita also thinks about food in the way that I think the best chefs think about it: as something that is always in the process of becoming rather than something that has been decided. The seasonal menu changes that seemed ambitious when we first discussed them have turned out to be one of the most important decisions we made before opening. They have given the kitchen a creative rhythm, a structure for improvement, and a reason for guests to keep coming back to see what has changed. That was her thinking more than mine, and she was right.

Panos and the bar

The cocktail programme at Nectar at the end of year one is significantly different to the cocktail programme at the start, and not just in terms of the specific drinks on the menu.

We have gone from good cocktails to great ones. That sentence is easy to write and harder to substantiate, so let me try. In the early months, the drinks were built from good instincts, good technique, and a genuine desire to create something more interesting than the average Edinburgh cocktail menu. That was enough to produce a list that people were enthusiastic about from the beginning.

What has happened since then is a different kind of development. The team, led by Panos but built collaboratively, has moved from creating cocktails to developing methods for creating flavour. Densing, the technique developed at Panda and Sons that Nectar was among the first bars to adopt, changed what we can do with fat and texture in a glass. Fat washing gave us a different route to the same territory. Milk punch clarification produced a cocktail that arrives looking like water and tastes like a Greek kitchen. Infusion timings, foam development, syrup construction: all of it has become more sophisticated not because we set out to be technically ambitious but because the desire to create better flavour naturally leads in that direction.

The competition entries have been part of this. Reaching the Scotland Finals of the Bumbu Originals, the advanced rounds of the Patron Margarita Challenge, entries into the Olmeca Altos competition and the Jägermeister Meister Hunter: each of those processes produced a cocktail that was examined at a level of rigour that regular service does not require, and that rigour fed back into everything else on the menu. The Old Beanut, the densed peanut butter old fashioned that Panos and I had been talking about since before we opened, is a direct product of that development trajectory. A year ago it would not have been possible to make it the way it needs to be made. Now it is on the menu and it is one of the most distinctive things currently available at any bar in Edinburgh.

I am genuinely excited about where the bar goes from here. Not in a vague, motivational sense, but in the specific sense of having watched what happens when a team of people with good instincts and genuine curiosity has a year to develop their craft in an environment that rewards ambition. The cocktails we will be making in year two are going to be better than the ones we are making now, and the ones we are making now are already better than anything we had imagined when we opened.

Eirini and the room

There is something that Eirini said to me early in the first year that I keep coming back to. She said: when people walk in, it is like they are coming into our home.

That is a deceptively simple statement about a complicated thing. Making a room feel like home to people who have never been in it before is not a skill that is easily taught or easily described. It involves reading people quickly and accurately, making decisions in real time about what a table needs and what it does not need, calibrating the level of interaction to the specific mood of each guest rather than applying a standard approach to everyone. Eirini does all of this instinctively, in a way that I observe but cannot fully explain, in a way that produces the specific quality of warmth that guests describe when they review Nectar or recommend it to someone else.

The atmosphere of Nectar is the product of the room, the food, the cocktails, and the team. But the atmosphere of Nectar on a busy Friday evening, when every table is full and the energy has built to the point where nobody wants to leave, is primarily the product of how Eirini and the team manage the room. That is not a small thing. It is, in the most direct sense possible, why people come back.

The people

There is a version of this article that lists the things we have built and achieved in year one. It would include the awards, the competition results, the review count, the events we have hosted, the menu cycles, the techniques we have developed, the press coverage we have received.

I am not going to write that version, because it measures the year in the wrong units.

The thing that has actually defined the first year of Nectar is the people. The guests who started coming in the first weeks when the menu was still being refined and came back every few weeks after that. The regulars who greet the team by name and ask what is new. The strangers who started talking to each other at adjacent tables on a busy Saturday and left as something closer to friends. The dogs who have their favourite spots. The solo diners who sat at the bar and stayed for three hours. The birthday groups who arrived planning to stay for two hours and called us the following week to book again.

Broughton Street is full of extraordinary people, and we are genuinely grateful to be a part of it. We have made too many connections to name, and too many to count, and every single one of them has contributed something to what Nectar has become in year one that no operational system or business strategy accounts for.

This is what Eirini meant when she said people walk in like they are coming home. Not because the room looks like their living room or because the team behaves like their family. But because the warmth between the people in the room is real, and because a year of that warmth accumulating has produced something that feels genuinely irreplaceable on this street.

The events we did not plan for

One of the things I genuinely did not anticipate when we opened was how much of Nectar's identity would be shaped by the events that happened inside it.

Greek Night is the most obvious example. DJ Leo on the decks on the last Friday of every month, traditional Greek music building through the evening, and a room that has, on multiple occasions, produced people dancing on tables and circle dances forming on the floor without any of us asking for it to happen. The numbers are still modest. But the energy in the room on those nights is something that a full house on a standard Friday does not always produce, and watching it grow month by month has been one of the more genuinely surprising pleasures of the year.

Then there are the celebrations. The birthday parties, the hen dos, the anniversaries, the groups who called ahead to ask if we could hold the room for something specific and who arrived having trusted us with their most important days. The sheer number of those evenings has, at times, been overwhelming in the best possible way. People choosing to spend their most significant moments in a room we built a year ago is not something I have found a way to be casual about, and I do not think I want to.

And then Christmas. We ran an advent calendar through the entire month of December, a different offering every day, and the person who made it possible was my own mother, who threw herself into it with a commitment that I had not anticipated and that the guests responded to with a warmth I will not forget. It was the most personal thing we did in the first year, and it was also, in retrospect, one of the most Nectar things we did: something that started as a plan and became something considerably more special because of the specific person involved in making it happen.

What we have built, and why it matters

I said earlier that milestones are not how I want to measure this year. I stand by that. But there are things we have built in twelve months that I think are worth naming, not to boast but because they represent something real about the kind of business Nectar is becoming.

My background is marketing. My dream when we opened was to build a marketing function for Nectar that reflected the seriousness of the business we were trying to build, not a social media account updated occasionally and a Google listing, but a genuine content strategy, a voice, a presence online that matched the quality of what was happening in the room. We have done that. The blog you are reading is part of it. The monthly newsletter that goes out to our guests is part of it. The website that has been continuously developed and improved throughout the year is part of it. Our customers may not notice the infrastructure behind these things, and they should not have to. But it is there, and it is working, and it represents a bet on content and brand that very few independent hospitality businesses in the UK are making at this scale.

We were awarded Startup of the Year at the National Startup Awards Scotland in the Hospitality, Tourism and Events category, which was recognition from the entrepreneurial community that what we have built in year one is worth taking seriously as a business rather than just as a bar.

And then there is the Great British Entrepreneur Awards shortlisting. Consumer Entrepreneur of the Year, a national competition, alongside businesses from across the UK. We will be at Grosvenor House in London in November as a team, in a room of 1,500 entrepreneurs, and whatever the result, that is a room we have earned the right to be in after one year on Broughton Street.

What comes next

After one year, we are faced with a question we did not expect to be asking this early: what does growth mean for us, and how do we want to continue?

We have not answered it yet. That is the honest truth. We are thinking about it, talking about it, and resisting the pressure to decide before we are ready. Growth means different things depending on what you believe the business is actually for, and we want to be clear on that before we commit to a direction.

What we do know is this: whatever comes next will be built on the same three things that have defined year one. Great food. Delicious drinks. An atmosphere where people do not want to leave.

Everything else is still being decided. But those three things are not up for discussion. They are what Nectar is, and they are what it will remain, wherever the next year takes us.

But I think the most honest thing I can say about year two is that the ambition is not to build something bigger than what we have built. It is to build something better. The food that makes guests gasp. The cocktails that people talk about on the way home. The room that people describe to friends in terms that make those friends feel they have missed something worth seeing.

The memories and the impacts. That is the measure.

Not how many tables we turned on a Saturday night. Not what the review count reaches. Not which awards we win or which competitions we place in, though we will keep entering both, because the process of being measured against the best is the thing that makes you better, and being better is the only thing worth chasing.

One year of Nectar on Broughton Street. It has been the hardest thing I have ever done and the most worthwhile.

We will see you for year two.

Book a table at Nectar Bar and be part of what comes next.

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