Why Nectar Edinburgh has Seasonal Menus and Changes Its Food Every Three Months

The prawns in tomato sauce are one of the best dishes to come out of Margarita's kitchen.

I say that with complete confidence and without much qualification. The sauce is rich and spiced and has a depth that takes time to build. The prawns absorb it properly rather than sitting on top of it. The dish has been on the menu since we opened and it consistently generates the kind of reaction that tells you something has been cooked correctly: the plate comes back empty and the table immediately asks if they can have another portion.

It will not be on the summer menu.

Not because it has stopped being excellent, and not because guests have stopped ordering it. It will come off the menu in summer because it is a winter dish, and serving a winter dish in summer is a quiet act of dishonesty about what food is supposed to do and when it is supposed to do it. Understanding why we think that way explains most of what drives the decision to change the menu every three months.

Seasonality: food that fits the time of year

Greek cooking has always been built around the seasons in a way that many other culinary traditions have drifted away from. The Mediterranean diet, at its most traditional, is not a fixed collection of dishes. It is a way of eating that follows the rhythm of what is available, what the climate calls for, and what the body actually needs at a given time of year.

In winter, that means dishes with weight and warmth. Rich sauces, slow-cooked vegetables, proteins that have had time to develop depth. The prawns in tomato sauce belongs in that category, and so does the vegetable stew that has been on the menu through the colder months. Both are dishes that make sense when Edinburgh is grey and cold and the evening has that particular quality of needing something substantial to sit with.

In summer, that reasoning inverts. The light changes, the terrace fills, and the mood of a table in July is different to the mood of a table in January. A rich tomato sauce feels heavier than it should when the sun is still in the sky at nine in the evening. A summer salad, built from ingredients that are at their best right now rather than their best three months ago, does what the stew does in winter but for a different version of the same instinct: it fits.

This is not about removing dishes that people love. It is about recognising that the same dish can be the right choice at one time of year and the wrong choice at another, and that a kitchen confident enough in its cooking should be able to reflect that honestly rather than keeping a fixed menu because change is difficult.

The dishes that stay across seasons are the ones that transcend that logic. The chicken skewer is on every menu we have ever produced, because the combination of proper marinating, direct heat, and the specific character of the chicken means it is never the wrong dish regardless of when it is ordered. The cheese filo pastry is the same. Some dishes earn permanence through that kind of universal rightness. Most dishes earn their place for a season and then make way for something that does the same job better for the next three months.

Listening to guests: what data actually tells you

We talk to our guests constantly. If you have been to Nectar you will have noticed this: we check in, we ask questions, we pay attention to what the table says about what they have eaten. This is not performative hospitality. It is the primary mechanism through which the menu develops.

The most important thing I have learned about guest feedback, though, is that what people say and what people do are not always the same thing. A guest can tell you a dish is excellent and mean it entirely sincerely, and that dish can still come off the next menu. The reason is data, specifically the data that comes from watching what actually gets ordered and what comes back on the plates.

A dish that receives universally positive verbal feedback but sits near the bottom of the order frequency tells you something specific: either the description on the menu is not communicating what the dish actually is, or something about the price point or the position on the menu is working against it, or there is a version of the dish that would generate the same positive response and also get ordered more consistently. Any of those diagnoses leads to the same conclusion: something needs to change, even if the dish itself is good.

The plates are equally revealing. A dish that comes back consistently half-eaten is telling you something that no amount of positive verbal feedback cancels out. Either the portion is wrong, or the flavour works for the first few bites and then loses people, or the dish is being ordered as an addition to a table that has already eaten enough. Each of those is different information and each leads to a different decision, but all of it is more honest than asking someone directly whether they enjoyed their food and taking their answer at face value.

The vegetable stew is a good example of this process working as it should. It is a dish that garners genuine appreciation from the tables that order it. The people who try it understand immediately what it is and why it belongs on a Greek menu. The data also shows that it is consistently one of the less ordered items on the menu, which tells us something about how it reads to someone encountering the menu for the first time. The summer version of what that dish is doing, a salad built from ingredients at their seasonal peak with the same thoughtfulness about composition, may communicate its appeal more immediately. We will learn from that too.

Pushing boundaries: Margarita's kitchen as a development space

The most honest reason the menu changes every three months is the most uncomfortable one to state plainly: we are not good enough yet, and we know it.

That is not self-deprecation. Nectar has 300 five-star Google reviews and a kitchen that produces food people travel to Broughton Street specifically to eat. The prawns in tomato sauce is genuinely excellent. The chicken skewer is consistently the best version of what it is. The cheese filo pastry has earned its place on the permanent menu through the specific quality that makes a dish unforgettable rather than merely good.

All of that is true. And also: Margarita spends days working on dishes that may never make it to the menu, cooking them for the team, listening to the feedback, adjusting, trying again, and sometimes starting from scratch. The ambition that drives that process is not satisfied by a menu that has found something that works and stopped there. The goal is to cook food that makes guests gasp. Not in the theatrical sense of molecular gastronomy or spectacular presentation for its own sake, but in the genuine sense of tasting something and being surprised by how right it is.

As we have been open longer, I have noticed something in the kitchen that I could not have anticipated before we opened. The dishes are getting harder to make. Not harder in the sense of being more complicated for the guest to understand or eat, but harder in the sense that they demand more precision, more technique, and more from the kitchen than the earlier iterations of the menu did. Margarita is pushing into territory that is more advanced than where we started, and the reason is not ambition for its own sake. It is that our guests have raised the standard by responding so positively to what we have produced so far. When a guest's reaction to the prawns tells you what that dish is capable of, it becomes more difficult to settle for anything less from the next dish that comes out of the kitchen.

The three-month cycle gives that ambition a structure. Every quarter is a creative deadline, a moment when the question becomes: what have we learned, what can we do better, and what is the version of this menu that reflects three more months of cooking, thinking, and listening? That question produces better food than a static menu that removes the incentive to keep asking it.

Kitchen logistics: the practical reality most restaurants don't talk about

There is a fourth reason the menu changes, and it is considerably less romantic than the others, but it is real and it matters.

Before we opened Nectar, I did not fully understand how much the physical configuration of a kitchen shapes what is possible to cook in it. The layout of the equipment, where the heat sources are, what can run simultaneously without overloading a section, what dishes require the same cooking method and can therefore be produced efficiently at the same time: all of this is a constraint that the menu has to work within rather than work around.

The early versions of the Nectar menu were developed, in part, as a learning exercise in understanding those constraints. What we discovered, gradually, through the experience of running service after service, is that certain combinations of dishes work better together from a kitchen logistics perspective than others. Not in terms of flavour or concept, but in terms of the practical reality of producing them to the right standard simultaneously, in a kitchen of this size, during a busy Friday night service.

The quarterly menu change allows us to take what we have learned from three months of actual service and apply it to the next version. A dish that is excellent in isolation but creates a bottleneck during peak service is a dish that may need to be replaced or reconsidered, not because it is not good, but because the kitchen cannot produce it at the standard it deserves when twenty other things are happening at the same time.

This is not a limitation we apologise for. Every kitchen in the world operates within physical constraints, and the best kitchens are the ones that understand those constraints well enough to design menus that work with them rather than against them. The quarterly cycle gives us the opportunity to keep improving that alignment, and the menu that results from it is more consistently excellent across every dish because the kitchen is not being asked to do more than it can do well.

What this means for guests

If you visit Nectar regularly, you will notice the menu shifting. A dish you loved in winter may not be there in summer. Something you have not seen before will have taken its place. The bones of the menu, the sharing format, the Greek and Mediterranean identity, the combination of grilled meats, pastry, seafood, and vegetable dishes, remain consistent. What changes is the specific expression of those categories, updated every three months to reflect the season, the feedback, Margarita's continuing development as a chef, and the practical learning that comes from running this kitchen.

The dishes that stay are the ones that have demonstrated, over multiple menu cycles, that they belong on every version of this menu regardless of season or circumstance. The chicken skewer will be on the menu when we have been open for ten years. The cheese filo pastry will be there too. Everything else is subject to the same honest assessment that has driven every menu change since we opened: is this the best version of what this dish can be, and is it the right dish for right now?

If the answer to either of those questions is no, something better is coming.

Book a table at Nectar Bar and try the current menu before it changes.

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

Nectar Bar, 73 Broughton Street, Edinburgh EH1 3RJ