São Paulo, 470 years old, is an old woman who underwent facial harmonization – 01/19/2024 – Cozinha Bruta

The pizzeria of my childhood had a neon sign and strong white lights in the room. You entered it through a swinging door, like those in bang-bang movie bars.

The oven was not visible to customers – show pizza is a trend that only appeared later. The waiters, dressed as penguins, brought the aluminum molds from some hidden compartment at the back of the restaurant.

The tables were covered with threadbare tablecloths and, above them, squares of waxed paper with the establishment’s letterhead.

Fake wood panels covered the walls, but only halfway up the floor. On the ceiling, fans with two propellers produced a roar that could be compared to that of current drones.

At the exit there was always a man selling helium balloons. He would always steal a few bucks from my dad, and the balloon would always fly out the car window before we got home.

It’s not a description of any particular pizzeria, it’s shards of memory pasted onto a board that’s probably not very faithful to any real experience. The only thing that came to mind, in a generic and blurry way, was the atmosphere of a dinner in the 1970s in São Paulo.

If you want to experience this atmosphere, go to the Castelões pizzeria, in Brás – which is much older but, anyway, I can’t remember what I didn’t experience. It is one of the few in the city to preserve furniture and trinkets from the past.

São Paulo is a city that refuses to age with dignity. When she turns 470 on the 25th, she wants to pretend to be a young girl: she dyes her hair, tones her face and thinks no one notices.

In the restaurant and bar sector, it hurts so much to see old houses that, in their eagerness to modernize, end up disfigured, deformed, degenerate, devoid of soul.

The pizzeria of my childhood installed drywall, cleaned the light bulb stores on Rua da Consolação and installed four gigantic TVs, one on each wall, 24 hours a day for European football.

The impetus for destructive construction, although not exclusive to São Paulo, finds fertile ground here.

Take Rio. It’s full of bars destroyed by excessive entrepreneurship, but it also shows, in relation to historical heritage, a reverence that you don’t see around here.

São Paulo is obsessed with impermanence. A businessman from São Paulo goes into heat when there is a promotion for hydraulic tiles at Leroy Merlin.

When the restaurant’s bathroom clogs, the owner decides to break everything, add a wind machine to dry your hands and that light sensor that always goes off while you pee.

I recently returned from London (ostentatiousness detected), and there are pubs there with centuries of service to alcoholism.

Its halls are Georgian, Victorian, dimly lit, all mahogany, a little greasy. They do not have an electrical outlet for each customer’s cell phone. The place is old and looks old, the parish likes it that way.

In São Paulo there are very few of these places left. They preserve themselves, I suspect, more through carelessness than zeal. Which isn’t all bad.

A bit of stylish decadence goes well with a 470-year-old lady.

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