Human safari on Rua Oscar Freire – 05/09/2023 – Cozinha Bruta

I get off the bus at Conjunto Nacional, go down Rua Augusta and turn left onto Oscar Freire. It’s almost five in the afternoon on a given weekday, and I’m on my way to the Bacio di Latte ice cream shop, where I’ve been called to launch a certain pistachio festival.

Almost getting there, I hear someone calling me from across the street. It was Oscar Bosch, Catalan chef, great cook, very fine people, owner of the award-winning Tanit restaurant, right there.

Hi, it’s okay, it’s gone… the brief conversation makes me think that I actually disappeared from those parts. Not just because of my background in social caving (as opposed to social climbing) in recent years.

I no longer feel comfortable on Rua Oscar Freire. I want to get out as soon as possible. I don’t know if the street has changed, but I certainly have changed a little.

I go into the ice cream parlor and they offer me a sparkling wine, then a negroni, not bad for the time of day. I notice that the guests don’t talk to each other, they are all absorbed in the production of videos of faces, mouths and pistachio cream.

They are influencers.

I eat my candy and go to the bathroom. On the way out, I see a woman taking selfies by the washbasin. It was my time to go. I had another appointment downtown, the subway was my destination.

Soon I come across the most uncomfortable corner of chic Oscar Freire, Rua Peixoto Gomide. There’s a pretty little building there, but all scuffed up, graffitied, detonated. Your story is not pretty.

About 15 years ago, an investor bought the entire building to turn it into a boutique hotel. Not all, sorry: two residents refused to sell. The company would then have called a group of homeless people to break into the building and force the rebels out.

I don’t know the fate of the former residents, but the homeless are still there, a festering sore on the white complexion of Jardins.

I walk a little further and pass by a shop that describes itself as a gourmet biscuit shop.

In the cafe in front of the Hotel Emiliano, tons of white people speaking Portuguese and English, sometimes mixed.

In the next block I stop to finally try the hot dog at PoPa, which makes everything that goes into the sandwich by hand: the bread, the sausage, the mustard, the ketchup.

As I devour my gourmezaço dogão (it is, yes, as good as they say), I am recognized by a woman at another small table.
“Do you have that show on TV?”

“Yes I have.”

“So, you’ve got a beard full of grated parmesan.”

One more cue to keep walking.

On the same block, living relics of São Paulo gastronomy: the first branch of Almanara outside the city center and Frevo, which speculation pushed to the other side of the street.

I have flashes of esfihas and beirutes, of family lunches when, at least in my head, that region wasn’t so wild. Or I was more stupid, it doesn’t matter.

Walking in front of me, a couple from Rio de Janeiro is dazzled by the maintenance of the pavement. “Could have paved like this on all the streets of Leblon, no?”, he says to her.

On my right, the neatest camelódromo I’ve ever seen in my life. This is Jardins, you know?

A few steps further on, I’m approached again, this time by a press agent I haven’t seen since I was the editor of a men’s magazine. She invites me to visit an importer’s store, which is being prepared for a wine tasting.

It doesn’t invite me to stay. I couldn’t stay anyway.

I quicken my pace towards Avenida Rebouças.

I notice that, with each block I advance, the number of people walking in the same direction grows, at an even faster pace.

They are employees of stores, beauty salons, pet shops, pilates studios and facial harmonization clinics. The fuel for the Jardins machine.

Opposite the subway, a Dia% market to supply the return of workers. And the infallible cart of corn and margarine.

The gastronomy of Rua Oscar Freire is very varied.

PRESENT LINK: Did you like this text? Subscriber can release five free hits of any link per day. Just click the blue F below.