The Story Behind Nectar. How a Lockdown Idea Became a Broughton Street Reality

Like many stories that began during COVID, ours started in close quarters.

During lockdown, everyone who now works at Nectar found themselves living together in the same flat. With time on our hands and the world temporarily paused, conversations naturally turned inward. Like so many others, we began asking ourselves what we wanted to do differently with our lives.

With a strong family history in hospitality, opening our own place was not a far-fetched idea. In many ways, it felt inevitable. What we did not yet know was how clearly our individual paths would come together to make it possible.

A Shared Background, Different Strengths

Each of us arrived at Nectar with a completely different skill set, shaped by years of experience across hospitality and beyond. That combination of strengths is, honestly, what made it work. None of us could have built this alone.

The Nectar Team

Margarita

Our head chef Margarita has spent years building her career in some of Edinburgh's most respected kitchens. She has worked across high-end restaurants throughout the city, including time as sous chef at Fava, head chef at Wine and Peach, and many years at Locanda de Gusti.

Her passion has always been food. Not trends, not shortcuts, but flavour, balance, and the quiet satisfaction of making something genuinely good. When you eat at Nectar, you are eating food built on that philosophy. Every dish on the menu carries the weight of her experience and the lightness of her instinct. The Prawn Saganaki, the Cheese Filo Pastry, the Chicken Skewers are all expressions of a chef who has spent years refining what she cares about.

Eirini

Eirini brings the front of house to life in a way that is genuinely difficult to teach.

With a hospitality degree and experience across a wide range of venues, from fine dining restaurants to more relaxed settings, she understands service at every level. Her real strength, though, lies in people. She has an instinctive ability to make guests feel comfortable, welcome, and genuinely looked after from the moment they arrive.

If you have ever visited Nectar and left feeling lighter than when you came in, that is not an accident. Making people happier when they leave than when they arrived is something Eirini takes seriously. It shapes every interaction, every evening, every table she looks after.

Panos

Panos, Owner, Bar Manager

Panos has worked behind the bar for as long as he has been legally allowed to work.

His experience stretches across nightclubs and fine dining restaurants, from the Greek islands to Dublin's high streets. He has seen every side of bar culture and built an instinct for what separates a good cocktail from a memorable one. What he always missed, in every role before Nectar, was creative freedom. The freedom to build menus from scratch, to experiment with technique, and to create drinks that genuinely surprise people.

At Nectar, that space finally exists. The Tzatziki Martini, Chemistry Lessons, Beach Bonfire, Drops of the River are all products of that freedom, applied with craft and precision. If you want to understand how Panos thinks about cocktail building, we wrote about that process here.

Chris

Chris, Owner, General Manager

And then there is me.

I have worked in coffee shops, nightclubs and restaurants across Edinburgh, but my background before all of that was marketing. I came from advertising, from building brands and telling stories for other people's products. What always drove me underneath all of it was a desire to build something of our own.

Nectar is where that desire finally found its shape. Strategy, storytelling, operations and creativity, working together in one place for the first time. It is the hardest thing I have ever done, and the most worthwhile.

From Idea to Reality and the Road That Nearly Went Elsewhere

Over time, the idea of Nectar solidified.

We spent months refining what we wanted to create. The food, the drinks, the atmosphere, the kind of place we wanted to walk into ourselves. One thing was always clear: we wanted a location where our food and our ethos would be understood. A neighbourhood, not a tourist strip. A street with its own identity, not a concession to footfall.

Then we found 73 Broughton Street.

Panos and I visited first. There was something immediate about it. The layout, the light, the proportions of the room. We could see what it already was and what it could become. We submitted an offer almost immediately.

And then the deal fell through.

We started looking elsewhere. We came very close to securing a venue in Stockbridge, another Edinburgh neighbourhood with a strong local identity and exactly the kind of community feel we were after. That deal fell through too.

Two venues. Two near-misses. A lot of uncertainty about whether the right space actually existed.

Then, almost by chance, we reached out to Broughton Street again. The venue had come back onto the market. We moved quickly, and this time it held. The space that had felt right from the first visit was finally ours.

Looking back, it is difficult not to read something into that. The two failed deals, the return to the original space, the sense that the street had been waiting for us to come back. Whether or not you believe in those things, the timing felt significant. Broughton Street was always where Nectar was meant to be.

Finding Our Place on Broughton Street

What has meant the most to us since opening is how warmly Broughton Street has welcomed Nectar.

This is a street with its own rhythm and its own identity. Independent businesses, a strong sense of community, neighbours who look out for each other. Becoming part of that is something we are proud of and genuinely grateful for in equal measure.

Seeing familiar faces return, locals recommend us to friends, and the room slowly fill with regulars who feel at home here is the thing that makes the exhaustion of the early months feel worthwhile. We are eight months in and we have over 220 five-star Google reviews. Roughly half of every new customer who walks through the door arrives because someone who has been before told them to come.

That kind of trust is not built quickly. It is built one evening at a time.

What Nectar Is Actually For

We have been asked many times how we would describe Nectar in a single sentence. The honest answer is that we built it to be the kind of place we wanted to exist but could never quite find.

A room that feels like home, but one where the music sometimes gets loud and the energy shifts as the evening goes on. Food that is soulful without being heavy. Cocktails that are genuinely creative without being inaccessible. A place that can hold a quiet midweek dinner and a Friday night that spills into something closer to a club, all within the same four walls.

That range is intentional. Nectar is warm always, but it is not precious. It breathes with the night and the people in it, and we would not have it any other way.

Greek-Mediterranean sharing plates alongside handcrafted cocktails, in an atmosphere that feels like being invited into someone's home where the host is not afraid to turn the music up. That is Nectar. That is what we built, and what we are still building every day.

We are eight months in. We have barely started.

Read about our menu here, or book your table and come and see for yourself.