The Laterna: The Lightest Drink on the Menu and the Heaviest Story Behind It

Some cocktails are built from a technique. Some are built from an ingredient. Some are built from a conversation between bartenders who push each other toward something neither would have found alone.

The Laterna was built from a memory.

Kyria Stella and the house on Voulgareos Street

On Voulgari Street in Thessaloniki, there is a cocktail bar called Laterna. It has outdoor seating, a neighbourhood warmth that most bars spend years trying to manufacture and never quite achieve, and a story that begins before it was a bar at all.

Kyria Stella, Mrs Stella, lived in that house. She was the kind of person whose presence shapes the atmosphere of a street without anyone consciously noticing, until the day it is no longer there. The people who knew her described her the way people describe the fixtures of a neighbourhood they love: as someone who was simply part of what made the place feel like itself. Her kindness was not the performative kind. It was the quiet, consistent kind that accumulates across years and becomes the thing a community is built on.

When Kyria Stella passed away, her children made a decision that says something about how well they understood who she was. They sold it to a person from their neighborhood, who turned the house into something special. They opened it as a bar, named it Laterna, and gave it outdoor seating so the neighbourhood could continue to gather in the space she had made warm. Three years on, the bar is still there, still run with the love and hard work that the anniversary post on their page describes, still the place that the people who knew Kyria Stella go when they want to be somewhere that carries her in it. They also only hire people from that area.

Panos and Eirini used to walk past it on their way home. They knew that street, knew that bar, and knew the story behind it. It was not a famous bar. It was not the kind of place that appears in guides to Thessaloniki's best cocktail scene. It was a neighbourhood bar that existed because someone's children wanted to keep a piece of their mother alive in the world.

I visited it myself for the first time on a visit to Thessaloniki. I sat outside, ordered a cocktail, and it arrived with cucumber in it. Fresh, cold, impossibly refreshing in the way that a drink on a warm Greek evening can be refreshing in a way that the same drink in Edinburgh never quite replicates. It was the first time I had tasted a cucumber cocktail made the way Greek bars make them in summer, and I understood immediately why the format has become one of the defining tastes of the Greek bar scene from June through September.

The cocktail we serve at Nectar is our version of that drink. The name was never in question.

The cucumber cocktail as a Greek summer institution

If you have spent time in Greece during summer and visited any bar that takes its drinks seriously, you have almost certainly encountered some version of this drink. Cucumber cocktails are ubiquitous in the Greek bar scene from June through September, appearing everywhere from The Clumsies in Athens, one of the world's top ten bars, to small neighbourhood places on residential streets in Thessaloniki. The format varies: the base spirit changes, the secondary ingredients shift, the serve is sometimes long and sometimes short. But the principle is always the same: cucumber as the defining character, something clean and herbal and alive, extended with citrus and something sparkling into a drink that does one thing above all others. Refreshment. Genuine refreshment, not the mild pleasantness of a cold drink but the specific sensation of something that actively counters the heat rather than simply existing alongside it.

The relationship between cucumber and Greek drinking culture goes back further than the cocktail bar. In a traditional Greek taverna, when you order tsipouro, the local grape spirit, it arrives alongside a small plate of meze. Olives. Rusks. Sometimes a piece of cheese. Almost always, sliced cucumber. The cucumber is the palate cleanser, the thing that resets you between sips, that uses its high water content and its freshness to prepare you for the next glass. It has been on Greek tables alongside spirits for as long as anyone can remember, which is why the move toward building a cocktail around it felt natural rather than innovative when the Greek bar scene began doing it seriously.

How the Laterna is built

Our version is made with Bacardi Carta Blanca as the base. Rum rather than gin, which is a deliberate departure from the most expected interpretation of a cucumber cocktail. The rum is clean and light enough to let the other ingredients breathe without dominating, but it brings a slight warmth and a tropical edge that gin does not have, which shifts the whole register of the drink toward something a little more generous without losing the freshness that is the entire point.

The cucumber arrives as a syrup rather than through muddling or fresh juice. A cucumber syrup concentrates the essence of the ingredient and integrates it into the drink more completely than fresh cucumber achieves at the point of mixing. It carries the clean, slightly earthy, deeply refreshing quality of cucumber in a stable form that is consistent across every serve.

St Germain elderflower liqueur sits alongside it, adding a floral sweetness that lifts the cucumber without competing with it. Elderflower and cucumber are natural companions: both light, both slightly herbal, both belonging to a flavour register that is more meadow than forest. The lime provides the acidity that keeps the drink feeling alive rather than simply sweet, and fig leaf soda extends everything into a long drink, adding a gentle botanical quality that plain soda does not have.

The result is pale green, cold, and clear. It is the lightest cocktail on the new menu. It is described on the menu as light, fresh, and cucumbery, which is three accurate words that do not hint at the story behind it.

What people are saying about it

The Laterna has only been on the menu for a short time, but the early responses have been consistent. The word that comes up most often is refreshing, and not in the casual way that any cold drink in summer earns the description. People finish it and immediately understand why it is on the menu. They order a second one before the first has been replaced at the table. They describe it as the thing they want to drink on the terrace before the rest of the evening arrives.

This is the specific function it was designed to perform. Not a challenging drink. Not a technically complex drink. A drink that is the right thing at the right moment: the one you order when you sit down, when the evening is just beginning, when the light is still in the sky and nobody has decided anything yet.

If you are building a table at Nectar and want to start with something that settles everyone into the evening before the food arrives and the cocktail conversation begins, the Laterna is the answer.

If you have never had a cucumber cocktail the way Greek bars make them in summer, this is where to start.

Both things are true and neither contradicts the other.

The name

Every cocktail on the Nectar menu means something. The Warmth Within describes a sensation. The Tzatziki Martini describes an ingredient and a format and a surprise simultaneously. The Local Connection describes a relationship between two bars on different streets in the same city.

The Laterna describes a bar on Voulgareos Street in Thessaloniki that was built as an act of love by children who wanted to keep their mother present in the neighbourhood she had helped to shape. It describes the place where I first understood what a cucumber cocktail could be. And it describes the particular quality of warmth that a bar can have when it exists for the right reasons rather than the obvious ones.

We named the cocktail for all of those things. The drink is the lightest thing on the menu. The story behind it is not.

Book a table at Nectar Bar and order the Laterna to start.

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