Solo Dining at Nectar Edinburgh: If You Come On Your Own, You Are Not On Your Own

A waiter in Hong Kong once looked at me and said, when I asked for a table for one at a highly acclaimed steakhouse: "Ooh, that's kind of sad."

I still sat down. I still ate the steak. It was a good steak, actually, which made the whole thing worse somehow. But I could not let that opening moment go. It sat across from me the entire meal, the uninvited third presence at the table, and by the time I paid the bill I had decided two things. First, that I was never going back. Second, that if I ever ran a place of my own, nobody walking through the door alone would ever feel that way.

That was the first day of a six-week trip. I spent the rest of it worrying, slightly irrationally, that every restaurant I walked into alone would produce the same reaction. Most of them did not. But the damage from that one moment took a while to shake, and I have thought about it more times than I would like to admit since opening Nectar.

It is why solo guests are, quietly, some of my favourite people to see walk through the door.

What actually happens when someone comes in alone

Nectar has two small rooms. The tables are close together. On a busy Friday or Saturday evening, the space between you and the person at the next table is not large, and that proximity, which might sound like a problem, turns out to be one of the things that makes the room what it is.

The majority of our guests are, simply put, excellent people. I do not say that as a line. I say it because it is observably, consistently true, and because the atmosphere in the room on a good night has almost nothing to do with us and almost everything to do with the specific collection of people who happen to be in it. When those people are the kind of people who notice someone sitting alone and make space for them in the conversation without being asked, the room becomes something that no amount of interior design or playlist curation produces.

This happens regularly. Not occasionally, not as a notable exception, but regularly. Someone comes in alone, sits down, orders, and within twenty minutes is in a conversation with the table next to them about something completely unrelated to food or drink. In good Scottish fashion, the people around them have simply decided that being alone is not a status that needs to be preserved if the person in question seems open to something else.

We do not engineer this. We cannot. It happens because our guests take care of each other, and that is not something a hospitality business can manufacture. You can create the conditions for it. You cannot make it happen.

How the experience changes when it is one person

From our side, a solo guest changes how we do everything, slightly but meaningfully.

The menu explanation shifts. Sharing plates for one is a different proposition to sharing plates for a table, and we approach it differently. A platter is not the right call unless someone is genuinely very hungry and wants to work through a lot of food. More often, the conversation becomes about what you actually feel like eating: two or three dishes that suit the mood, ordered in a sequence that makes sense for one person rather than a spread designed to cover the table.

The cocktail conversation becomes more personal. When a group is ordering, there is a negotiation happening: different preferences, different tolerances, the social calculus of what everyone can agree on. When it is one person, we can ask exactly what they like, what they have had before, what they want the drink to do for the evening, and point them somewhere specific rather than suggesting something that covers the most ground. The result tends to be a better drink ordered, drunk more slowly, with more conversation around it.

Solo guests also tend to stay longer. Not always, and not as a rule, but more often than a table of four or six. The pace is different. There is no bill to split, no consensus about when to leave, no one person in the group whose early flight the next morning determines when the evening ends. A solo guest at Nectar on a quiet Tuesday can become, without planning it, a two-hour conversation with whoever is behind the bar, and I have had some of the best conversations of the past year in exactly that format.

The bar seats

If you have been to Nectar you will know that the bar seats are a different proposition to the tables. Sitting at the bar puts you inside the room rather than adjacent to it.

We make jokes behind the bar. We laugh. We occasionally swear at each other, in the way that people who work closely together in a small space develop a shorthand that is not appropriate for a boardroom but is entirely appropriate for a bar at ten on a Friday night. We do not perform professionalism from behind the bar. We are just the people who work here, and the bar seats are the place where the line between team and guest becomes the most permeable.

If you are sitting at the bar, you are in the mix. You will hear the stories the regulars bring in. You will learn something about the techniques behind the cocktails, probably more than you wanted to. You will hear about Panos's weekend, or what I had for lunch, or something Eirini noticed about the room earlier in the service that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with what it is like to run a small bar on Broughton Street on a busy evening.

This is not a performance of warmth. It is just what the bar is like when the bar is working properly.

For a solo guest, the bar seats are the right call almost every time. Not because sitting alone at a table is unwelcoming, it is not, and plenty of solo guests prefer the privacy of their own space and their own thoughts and we respect that completely. But the bar seats exist to put you in the room in the most direct way possible, and for someone who has come in alone and is open to whatever the evening produces, that directness is usually the better option.

The thing about eating alone

There is a particular freedom to eating alone in a good room that I think gets undersold.

You order exactly what you want. You eat at the pace that suits you. You give your full attention to what is in the glass and on the plate rather than splitting it between the food and the conversation and the calculation of whether everyone at the table is having a good time. You notice things you might not notice when the social dimension of the table is running at full capacity.

Some of the most attentive, observant feedback we get about the cocktails comes from solo guests. Not because they are more critical, but because they are paying closer attention. A solo guest who orders the Tzatziki Martini and takes fifteen minutes to work through it will notice things about the drink that a table of six ordering simultaneously will not have the bandwidth to register. That attention is, from a purely selfish standpoint, one of the things I value most about solo guests. They give the cocktails and the food the kind of focus that the people who made them deserve.

The cheese filo pastry eaten alone, slowly, with a glass of Assyrtiko alongside it, is a different experience to the same dish arriving at a table of eight and disappearing in forty-five seconds. Both are good. They are genuinely different kinds of good.

What I promised myself in Hong Kong

The waiter in that steakhouse did not mean to ruin anything. I am fairly sure he was making a clumsy attempt at sympathy, or a joke that did not land, or something that made sense in his head and arrived in the world badly. I do not hold it against him, or at least I try not to, which is roughly the same thing at this point.

But the feeling it produced was real, and it was immediate, and it is the feeling I think about every time someone walks through the Nectar door alone. The slight contraction of confidence. The recalibration of what the evening is going to be. The sense of being seen in a way you did not want to be seen.

We do not do that at Nectar. Not because we are unusually virtuous, but because it is bad hospitality and also because it is wrong. Someone walking in alone has made a decision to spend their evening here, and that decision deserves exactly the same quality of welcome as any other.

Usually more, if anything. Because the evening belongs entirely to them, and there is nobody else at the table to make it good.

Book a table at Nectar Bar, or just come in. A table for one is a table. We will sort the rest.

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