In 2012, Maria Varamo moved to London. She’d been bartending in her native Italy since the age of 15, and finally had the opportunity to interview for a position behind the bar at the legendary Dukes Hotel in Mayfair—she longed for the opportunity to work under noted martini master Alessandro Palazzi. Varamo did get a job at the hotel, but in the restaurant. She was disappointed, but quickly decided to take matters into her own hands. She resolved to be the person who would bring Palazzi his coffee every morning. Three months later, Palazzi hired her and she became the first woman to ever bartend at Dukes Hotel.
Varamo began working in bars as a simple summer job, but found she had a knack and a passion for it. She eventually earned her bartender certification, but these official qualifications didn’t help her get hired full-time. Managers told her customers wouldn’t feel “comfortable” with a female bartender, but Varamo was determined. She decided to take extreme measures, offering to work a few days a week for free to prove she belonged. The gambit paid off and she was hired at a cocktail bar in Tuscany.
“I had to stomp my feet on the floor for them to give me a chance,” she says. “No man would ever have to do that.”
Her role as a professional bartender came with restrictive, self-imposed rules about her appearance. No skirts. No tights. No heavy makeup. No bright lipstick or nail polish. She always asked that her uniform be the same as her male colleagues. Anything else, she felt, would make the men around her feel tense or uncomfortable.
Her customers’ regressive attitude about women required that she “make them understand that they don’t have to behave differently because a woman is there,” she says.
She smoked cigars and chatted them up about her favorite whiskeys, easily charming every hotel and bar manager that crossed her path. Eventually, she became the first woman to bartend at the Hotel del Golfo in Tuscany, but she had outgrown Italy and wanted to see more of the world. Though Varamo didn’t speak a word of English, she moved to London in September 2012.
“I moved to London for Dukes,” she says. “It’s the temple of the martini cocktail. It was for Alessandro [Palazzi], I wanted to work for him,” she says.
Palazzi is a hero in the bartending world. At the time, working under him would have been the pinnacle of Varamo’s career. So when she was offered a position in the restaurant instead of the bar, she was frustrated and took a risk.
“I gambled everything I had,” she says.
Varamo brought Palazzi his coffee every morning, casually bringing up cocktails, her bartending experience, anything that would make her memorable in his eyes. She had to make sure that he understood her passion for bartending, and even recruited her bartender friends back in Italy to vouch for her. When a colleague moved to another hotel, Palazzi offered Varamo a place behind the bar.
“I was like, you’ve got to be kidding me,” she says. “He told me, ‘The only thing you have to get is the approval of the guests.’ It was the dream of my life. No one could have made anyone happier than Alessandro did by hiring me.”
Varamo was the first woman to ever serve as a bartender at Dukes, partly because at the time she was hired, Palazzi felt it was finally time to refresh the hotel bar’s atmosphere. He wanted to make it more modern and refined, and hiring a woman was part of that. Not all of the bar’s customers were quite as accepting.
“Some people were skeptical,” Varamo says. “To have a woman in the bar—it was unacceptable.”
Alessandro banned one customer who spoke out against the change from the bar for life.
Varamo worked as a bartender at Dukes for six years, before being promoted to a bar supervisor in the Great British Restaurant group. In September 2018 she received the medal of merit for bartending from the Italian government, the only woman to receive such an honor.
Varamo does not think of her struggle as a feminist issue, at least not entirely.
“Don’t be too feminist about this,” she warns at one point. She emphasizes repeatedly that bartending requires hard physical work, and that a female bartender exudes a “maternal” energy. Women behind the bar elsewhere might disagree. Varamo does acknowledge that the industry needs to be more open-minded and accepting of women.
“[Men] need to trust us behind the bar,” she says. “They need to understand that we are not less than them.”
