Opinion – Cuisine Bruta: São Paulo, the ugly city of chopps with two pastels

It started, I think, with an unintentionally funny TikTok video.

The person who narrates –the narration accelerated by the app makes everything more bizarre– climbs the stairs of a building and arrives at a terrace with some bar tables.

The voice of São Paulo says that the place is very popular, that it is perfect for spending hours snacking, especially with this wonderful view. The view from the “hidden rooftop in the center of São Paulo”: the Minhocão.

Ready. It was enough to trigger, on Twitter, a war between São Paulo and the rest of Brazil. A resident of Salvador published the video and wrote: “The concept of the wonderful view of the people of São Paulo is something that fascinates me.” Then the stick ate loose.

On the one hand, people from Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Bahia, Maranhão, Espirito Santo and Pernambuco people gloat over the exaggerated self-esteem of the Piratininga people; on the other, paulistanos defending the indefensible.

Nothing against the restaurant in question. I don’t know, I want to know. It’s called Cora, it’s played by a chef from the north of Argentina, it has an attractive menu and it’s not sold as a rooftop for anything.

Attributing beauty to Minhocão is nonsense. But he is there and, while he is there, we Paulistanos need to live with him. Coexistence has improved a lot in recent years, and Cora’s very existence is a sign of that.

As for the internet tomato war, it’s an outcropping of historic resentment. Paulistanos are hated throughout Brazil, and this has little to do with the indisputable ugliness of São Paulo.

In the 20th century, the industrial elite tried to place São Paulo as a model of prosperity created by educated aristocrats and disciplined immigrants – as a counterpoint to the mulatto, Mamluk, Cafuzo, indolent and poor country beyond the state line.

It didn’t happen, because it was a lie. São Paulo is as much Brazil as the rest of Brazil. There are still people here who think they are predestined, just as there are people out there who feed the myth by treating São Paulo as a strange being.

Brazilian cities are ugly. São Paulo scares the most because it’s the biggest of them all.

In the responses to Minhocão’s post, the wonderful non-São Paulo views were of beaches, mountains, forests, open fields, nature. Salvador, Rio and Brasília, our three capitals, had more careful human intervention. This does not save them from the ugliness of their bowels.

Get away from the edge of any beautiful coastal city in Brazil: all you see is ugliness as far as the eye can see.

Furthermore, São Paulo has its attractions. There are pubs, the Japanese roots from Liberdade, the Koreans from Bom Retiro, the Bolivian market, some hipster spots that really pay off, good pizza in various corners, northern houses, Jamaican food, Egyptian food.

There is hotness in the midst of Essepe’s ugliness (don’t talk to me about Sampa, man). Here we are. And we order a chopps and two pastels… but only in the imagination of someone who has just arrived from abroad.

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