Shortlisted for the Edinburgh Bartenders Ball, in More Categories Than I Expected

Once a year, Edinburgh's own hospitality industry stops and recognises itself, at the Edinburgh Bartenders Ball.

It is a genuinely different kind of occasion to the other awards we have been part of this year. There is no national judging panel assessing us against businesses from unrelated industries, no black tie ceremony in a London hotel. The Bartenders Ball is smaller, local, and from everything we have heard about it, it is really just the people who work across this city's bars and restaurants getting the chance to celebrate each other properly, once a year, in one room.

We have been shortlisted in six categories. I did not expect that number when the longlist was first published, and I still find myself slightly disbelieving it now.

What the Edinburgh Bartenders Ball is

The event was brought to Edinburgh for the first time in 2024 by Backs! Hospitality, a community interest company founded by David Smillie and Alex Riches, following several successful years of the same format running in Glasgow. The whole point of the awards is that they are peer-nominated, meaning the people deciding who deserves recognition are other people working in the trade, not brand representatives, not a panel of external judges, but the bartenders, managers, and hospitality staff of Edinburgh itself, voting on who they think is doing genuinely excellent work.

The format runs in two stages. A longlist is published first, drawn from public and industry nominations across the city, this year numbering into the hundreds of venues and individuals put forward across every category. From that longlist, the top 15 in each category are announced and a second round of voting opens, this time decided by a fifty-fifty split between public votes and votes from within the trade itself. That second round narrows each category down to a final five, and the winners are revealed on the night of the ball itself, held this year, as in previous years, at The Biscuit Factory in Leith.

We are currently sitting inside that shortlist of 15, in six separate categories, with the top five announced on 5 October.

Why this one matters differently

We have written honestly about the other awards Nectar has been part of this year, the Great British Entrepreneur Awards shortlisting, winning the National Startup Awards Scotland, and most recently being shortlisted for New Bar of the Year at the Scottish Bar and Pub Awards, where we did not win, and where we tried to be honest about why that was never really the point.

Coming out of that experience, and coming out of the DRAM Scotland recognition more broadly, we are genuinely excited to be in the running for this one specifically. Not because a win here would carry more weight in any objective sense, but because this is the award voted on by the exact community we are trying to become a genuine part of: the bartenders, managers, and hospitality staff of this city, judging each other on the work itself. Before we get anywhere near a final result, though, we need to make the top five, and the shortlist alone has already told us something worth sitting with.

Best Bar

Nectar is on the shortlist of 15 for Best Bar, alongside venues like Panda and Sons, Cocktail Geeks, Bittersweet, Bramble, Nauticus, and Hey Palu, among several others. These are bars with genuinely huge accolades behind them, some with international rankings, decades of combined experience, reputations that extend well beyond Edinburgh. Simply appearing on the same list as them, in our second year of trading, is something I do not take lightly.

Best Restaurant Bar

This is the category I personally believe we have the strongest chance in, because it fits what Nectar actually is more closely than any other. We are listed alongside Bittersweet, Badger and Co, Hawksmoor, Old Pal, Paz Taqueria, and Devil's Advocate, among others. A number of these venues are places I have genuinely been meaning to visit for a while, and Paz Taqueria in particular has, since I finally made it there, become one of my favourite restaurants in the entire city. Being shortlisted alongside a venue I would happily recommend to anyone is a strange and pleasant kind of validation.

Best Bar Team

The Best Bar Team category looks specifically at teamwork, hospitality, cleanliness, knowledge, pace, and what the organisers describe simply as a certain X factor. We believe we have several genuine ways to stand out here, and we are properly looking forward to seeing whether we make the final five. We are listed here alongside a number of the same venues already mentioned, Bittersweet, Hey Palu, Nauticus, Old Pal, Panda and Sons, as well as The Last Word and Uno Mas.

Unsung Hero: Margarita Tamousi

This is my favourite category in this entire awards process, and it is entirely because of who it is about.

The Unsung Hero category looks at reliability, team support, leadership by example, work ethic, positive attitude, and overall impact. Every one of those things describes Margarita, our head chef, the person who has carried our kitchen since the day we opened. She is shortlisted alongside a genuinely long list of incredible people across the city's hospitality scene, and I could not be more excited to see how far she goes in this one. If there is a category on this entire list where I feel the recognition is simply, straightforwardly deserved, it is this one.

Rising Star: Aris

Aris, one of our own bartenders, still relatively fresh to the team, has been shortlisted as one of the best newcomers in Edinburgh's bar industry. Given what Aris achieved at the Franklin and Sons Flavour in Motion competition earlier this year, making the UK top 20 within his first few months at Nectar, this shortlisting feels like exactly the right kind of recognition arriving at exactly the right moment in his career. What a genuine pleasure to see.

Best Shake: Aris and Panos

Best Shake looks at technique, consistency, presentation, speed and flow, product outcome, and flair and confidence. We are fortunate enough to have two bartenders shortlisted in this category, both Aris and Panos. If you have ever watched either of them behind the bar at Nectar, you already know why they deserve to be there.

Best Cocktail: The Tzatziki Martini

This is the shortlist I am personally most excited about. Our Tzatziki Martini has made the list, going up against some of the best drinks currently being made in this city. I genuinely believe it stands a real chance of being named the best cocktail in Edinburgh, and I do not say that lightly given the standard of everything else on this shortlist. Clarified, crystal clear, tasting of a Greek kitchen despite looking like nothing at all, it is the drink that most directly represents what we have been trying to do behind the bar since we opened.

What comes next

Voting for the final round is open now, running until the beginning of October, and the top five in every category will be announced on 5 October.

You can vote here if you want to take part.

We will find out, over the coming weeks, exactly how far Nectar has made it in each of these six categories. Whatever the result ends up being, we have already learned something from simply reaching this stage: two years in, on Broughton Street, with a team we are enormously proud of, we are being recognised by the exact community we set out to become part of.

We will update this article once the final five are announced.

Book a table at Nectar Bar and meet the people who made this shortlist possible.

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