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Cocktail chat: Lima’s Lady Bee
By Georgie CollinsLima’s pioneering Lady Bee bar is planning to kickstart the country’s drinks scene by using Peru’s ingredients in as creative a way as the restaurants that have garnered acclaim there.

*This feature was first published in the November 2024 issue of The Spirits Business magazine.
While Lima is home to some of the best restaurants in the world, the South American city is left somewhat wanting when it comes to bars – but one intimate venue in the Miraflores neighbourhood is starting to place Peru on the cocktail map.
“We don’t really have a drinks culture in Lima,” bar manager Alejandra León says, citing it as one of the biggest challenges she and owners Alonso Palomino and Gabriela León had when they opened Lady Bee in 2021. “There are so many restaurants, but no bars here in Lima.”
However, as tourism picked up following the Covid‐19 lockdowns, demand began to grow for a drinks offering in the city that matched that of its food, and the trio jumped at the chance to provide it.

The concept for Lady Bee was to create a venue that could combine the two cultures of dining and drinking with theatrical hospitality and a vibrant atmosphere. “We wanted to do the best we can – to cook and do cocktails,” explains Gabriela, who studied culinary arts, and later trained at the three‐Michelin‐starred Noma in Denmark. Her husband and business partner, Palomino, worked as a hotelier before becoming a bartender and spirits educator.
Innovative concept
The pair brought Gabriela’s sister, Alejandra (left), on board when she returned from working in Washington DC at the start of the pandemic, placing her at the wheel of Lady Bee’s operations. Now, the three have been able to bring this innovative concept to life, while cultivating a consumer appreciation for cocktails in the Peruvian capital that didn’t exist before. Alejandra notes that when Lady Bee opened, it was difficult for people to appreciate the bar’s concept of lower‐ alcohol, smaller‐volume cocktails, as the limited local drinking culture had previously been more focused on high‐alcohol, larger drinks. This has started to change, and locals are beginning to become more receptive to the type of experience and drinks Lady Bee offers. This is thanks, in part, to the way the team has capitalised on the extraordinary larder of ingredients that Peru offers, while also championing the producers that supply them, and prioritising sustainability.
However, while Lady Bee is dedicated to showcasing Peruvian ingredients, the lack of established fair‐trade channels in the country makes sourcing these products a significant challenge that requires careful planning and coordination. “One of the top challenges in Peru is that all the ingredients have to come by aeroplane,” Palomino explains, which affects the bar’s ethos of sustainability.

Seasonal ingredients
Furthermore, to spotlight the seasonal ingredients available to them in Peru, travel has become crucial to allow the team to understand location traditions, and make connections with communities, especially in the Amazon region, where sourcing unique ingredients that don’t have a significant environmental impact is possible.
However, Palomino notes, this has meant they have been able to work closely with a family in Puerto Maldonado, in the southern Amazon of Peru, near the Brazilian border, who help with processing and preparing some of the ingredients for use in Lady Bee’s dishes and drinks. This way, the team is able to take a collaborative approach, working closely with the local communities to ensure they are sourcing and using the ingredients in the best and most sustainable ways possible.
Alejandra adds: “Every season, we try to go over [to meet our suppliers in the Amazon], and check out what’s going on with the environment.” This, she says, allows Lady Bee to provide guidance to their producer partners on ways to improve their practices for better preservation and sustainability.
The hands‐on style of working side by side with their producers enables the team to gain a better understanding of the ingredients featured on the bar’s menus. “We first talk to the producers and try to understand the product – all the characteristics, the colours, the features that can give us different flavours when we develop them [into drinks].” Alejandra adds that working so closely with the producers also allows them to feel comfortable working with new or unusual ingredients. “Of course, you need long drinks, Highballs, apéritifs and so on, but with every single ingredient, we always want to show it all. We want to take advantage of every single thing that they give us.”

Gabriela and Palomino take the helm of menu development, with Gabriela drawing on her culinary background to allow the ingredients to reach their full potential. Yet, the ones sourced from the Amazon go much further than the food and drinks menus at Lady Bee, marking a true extension of the team’s sustainable philosophy. For example, one aromatic ingredient is used to flavour both the butter for the dishes and gin for the drinks, while also providing a pleasant scent in the bathrooms; and one of the bar’s signature serves, The Three Sips Martini, a blend of Intira Gin from Cusco, Sherry, and extra‐dry vermouth, is presented with a garnish of olive, succulent plant salicornia, sea lettuce, and Arapa trout caviar from Puno, on a spoon made from wood salvaged from trees felled by storms in the Amazon.
Speaking of the drinks, two serves have lent their name to the bar. “It’s very easy for people from around the world to understand a bar when it has a name of classic cocktails,” Alejandra says. “So we wanted to combine the White Lady and the Bee’s Knees – that is an easy way to get to customers, and it’s a fun name.”
She notes that both cocktails have a permanent spot on the bar’s menu, and are both made with Peruvian ingredients.

The meaning of ‘Lady Bee’
However, it goes far deeper than simply being a name that resonates with the masses and sounds nice. “Lady Bee is also the translation of one of the first products that we received from our producer communities: honey from Abeja Señoria,” Gabriela explains. For thousands of years these small, stingless native bees have played a key role pollinating the forests that supply the bar today, and their honey is used in a handful of drinks on the menu, including the Bee’s Knees.
Now that Lady Bee has succeeded in putting Peru on the mixology map (in October it placed 16th on the World’s 50 Best Bars list), I wonder what is next for the bar.
“Next year, we hope to move location so we can have more space,” Palomino says, noting they aim to never turn customers away when they are full, but the size of the 20‐seat space, with no room for standing, is becoming restrictive. Additional venues are in the pipeline, but each new space will be a different concept. “There will only be one Lady Bee in the world,” he says.
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