Tucked behind a lush, crimson door just off Broughton Street lies a cocktail connoisseur’s dream: Vivien. A baby-faced bar, seemingly fresh to Edinburgh’s hospitality scene but rooted in history, the speakeasy is sister to upstairs restaurant Vinette — Stuart Ralston’s latest venture.
The basement bar takes its name from famed lesbian poetry pioneer Renée Vivien, of the Belle Époque period. Though Edinburgh is a city so greatly steeped in history, with key figures nodded to in place names and statues, it is rare to see one referencing a woman, let alone one from the queer community and considered rather raucous in her time. I sat down with the bar’s trailblazer Rebekah George to discuss the importance of this female recognition in Edinburgh’s hospitality scene today.
Edinburgh isn’t a big city, and neither is its hospitality community; Rebekah reminisced on how “it’s pretty close knit,” as you’ll “normally find that all of us have worked with each other in some capacity somewhere down the line.” With that came a lot of support for Vivien, and therefore Rebekah, during opening as friends “[sent] lots of little supportive messages” and “came down to see the place.”
But only recently has it been possible for women to gain this type of traction in the industry, with Rebekah seeing over her career the shift away from “clearcut” gendered spaces, with “men behind the bar, men in the kitchen.” Now, though “the trend is still predominately there,” Rebekah sees a “big, big change.” This is especially the case at The Aizle Hospitality Group, of which Vivien is part of, where “it’s pretty much all female managers” and they are “very supportive of both men and women.”
Touching on social media, Rebekah offered an optimistic perspective, which took me by surprise; commenting on the use of Facebook groups to allow women in the sector to exchange experience and promote one another. “A lot of them are just kind of being positive, bringing each other on and just creating a nice atmosphere.” It was nice to hear a positive take on social media compared to the harm often seen elsewhere in the industry.
Another support for women within the bar industry is competitions, whereby leading professionals face one another in a battle of cocktails, within certain requirements. Having travelled across the globe for competitions, Rebekah has seen them move away from the original “sort of lad, lad, lad culture” towards “see[ing] a lot more women competing.”
If looking to make headway in the hospitality sector, Rebakah was clear that you should “be yourself, don’t apologise for having a voice.”
We finished by looping back to Vivien, both the bar and the poet; for Rebekah, “it’s nice to have a kind of marked female figurehead”, and I couldn’t agree more. I’m sure Renée Vivien would be proud to be spearheading this next generation of women embracing their voices.
Image provided by Rebekah George for The Student.