Caracol, a bar for music fans, reopens with a dance floor in SP – 12/15/2023 – Bars and nightlife

The Caracol bar has a new address. After leaving Rua Jaguaribe, in the center of São Paulo, where he worked for five years, and spending a season at Conjunto Nacional, on Avenida Paulista, he came closer to the excitement of Barra Funda this Friday, the 15th — at one catwalk away from him, more precisely.

The new location chosen by partners Millos Kaiser and Thiago Visconti is a two-story house at number 160 Boracéa Street, previously occupied by a carpentry shop and an art studio.

It’s a leap for Caracol, which opened its doors in 2018 in a smaller property that stretched along a long corridor divided by a balcony and which led to an open area with bleachers.

In the main hall, alongside fancy drinks, there were also sharp DJs that quickly transformed that area into a hot dance floor and the bar into one of the most popular spots among audiophiles in São Paulo.

In addition to the musical talent that brought together Brazilian and international names in the city center, the house was also a precursor to acoustic care that would only emerge more recently in bars in the city. In space, everything came from an analog sound system, a 1970s speaker imported from Oregon, in the United States.

In the first half of the year, the bar changed its headquarters after leaving the property where it was founded — Santa Casa, owner of the land, demolished the building and has plans to transform the site into a parking lot for the nearby hospital. Now, Caracol is taking the opportunity to expand and give more space to its strongest points: music, cocktails and gastronomy.

“It’s a space with more possible experiences because its architecture allows this. There are two floors, a terrace and a large focus on the street, which is quieter and will have two parklets, as well as services and sound facing outwards”, says Kaiser, one of the partners.

“The customer can stay there, listening to music without even entering the bar, have dinner downstairs in lower light, at a marble table and a good chair, or dance on the dance floor and sit in a bleacher upstairs. It’s a place that can be lived in different ways”, he says.

The sound on the ground floor of the bar, explains the partner, is the same as in the other house and echoes the new wave of listening bars dedicated to the sound experience that have appeared in recent months in São Paulo. Caracol, in fact, is cited as the first example of this model by the owners of these new houses, such as Domo and Matiz, although it was not created to reproduce the trend born in Japan around a century ago.

“I imported this idea from a place I played in London about eight years ago and where people were very quiet to listen to the music, but I find that unimaginable in Brazil. But the room on the first floor is designed for this very sound system. good and there will be a DJ program made by collectors and people who have cool records”, he says.

This curation will be accompanied by a menu with options for dinner and snacks, such as the cavaquinha roll (R$ 62), crustacean with aïoli and orange vinaigrette on brioche, and the alheira bolovo (R$ 35). The drinks menu was also rethought, with options such as the dry plinia (R$42), with an infusion of jabuticaba, gin, dry vermouth and saline solution, and the enzoni (R$38), with green grape, gin, Campari, lemon and sugar.

On the top side, the narrow dance floor in Jaguaribe becomes a more suitable size to receive DJs with a new powerful sound system, with parties that should continue until two in the morning from Thursday to Saturday and, on Sunday, take place during the afternoon.

This is Caracol’s biggest news. “We wanted to bring back this club experience, something almost lost in São Paulo, which now has many traveling parties in very large spaces”, says Kaiser.

Entry should vary between spontaneous collaboration and tickets around R$30. The idea, however, is for the spaces to talk to each other, with complementary programs — all under the intimate energy for which Caracol became known.