C… do Padre turns 65 with good beats, but surrounded by bad bars in Baixo Pinheiros

When I was asked to write about the 65th anniversary of the bar C… do Padre, the first question was: could I write “C… do Padre” in this centenary newspaper? If you saw an ellipsis after the letter “c” instead of the letter “u”, the answer is no.

The pub, whose official name is Bar das Batidas, has been on a corner of Pinheiros for all this time, behind the parish of Nossa Senhora do Monte Serrate – hence the nickname. No one has called the establishment by its formal name for decades. Name of very precarious imagination, let’s agree.

Strictly speaking, the birosca is on the side of the church, which doesn’t change much. Drunks don’t respect the clergy or the cardinal points.

To celebrate the date, C… do Padre rocked a street party this Saturday, the 27th, with shows of an Elvis cover and a Raul cover. The honored singers are dead, but the bar pulsates more than ever. Old that I am, I followed a good part of this story.

I entered C… do Padre for the first time in the late 1980s, when the extension of Avenida Faria Lima had not yet destroyed an extensive residential area.

It was a corner with a counter, no places to sit, and an incredible collection of provolones and salami hanging from the ceiling. With the intense movement of buses on Rua Pais Leme, next door, black soot covered the hangers. The bar only served beats. Maybe beers, I don’t remember – if I served them, they would certainly be lukewarm.

I returned at the beginning of the last decade, when the blocks between Largo da Batata and Marginal Pinheiros, revamped and with subway, gained the horrendous nickname of Baixo Pinheiros. The bar had been modernized a little, had started to offer meals, but it still maintained a decadent aura in an area whose biggest attraction was the transfer of public transport.

Since then, Baixo Pinheiros has flourished. They invented a corridor of bad bars on Guaicuí Street, a few meters from C… do Padre. A cluster of tourist traps, which every city has. São Paulo won a replica of the Passarela do Álcool, in Porto Seguro.

The surroundings were taken over by stores selling items for potheads, loudspeaker wars and street vendors selling Corote to the youngsters. Father’s C… took advantage of the new influx of drinkers. It expanded to the neighboring property, spread tables on the church sidewalk and became a large bar.

A little schizophrenic, I have to say. While the new wing absorbs the strays from Guaicuí, the sixty-year-old corner of C… do Padre remains almost untouched. It’s like two different bars, for different audiences. I am the audience of the old C… of the Priest.

The tiny space was empty when I arrived, around 6pm on a Wednesday. The floor and the counter are the same as the pub I saw in the last century. The ceiling is still full of hanging splinters, exposed to soot.

There are only two tables, each with three stools made from beer crates. I sat in one of them, and the next thing I knew, I was chatting with a gentleman who had gone to the counter to buy a shirt for his birthday event.

His name is Roberto Maekawa. He recognized me from the pranks I’d been up to on cable. He gave me a dose of cachaça that a friend produces somewhere in the countryside – and that Roberto leaves in the care of C… do Padre.

“I’ve been drinking here since 1970,” he said. Fifty-two years taking it at Father’s C… I asked him if the junk on the ceiling was already there at that time. “Oh, there was so much more! They took almost everything.”

Roberto then began to tell a story. In October 1977, when Corinthians won its first title after almost 23 years, the former owner of the bar ordered a provolone that was hanging down. In the celebration of Timão, the clientele ate the cheese with the flavor of a bus exhaust for free.

Father’s C…, by the way, is not a friendly bar for those who go in search of food. Meals appear only at lunch. The portions are monstrously large (R$39.90, ten pastries) and cannot be divided – they only work for large groups.

For those who drink alone or in pairs, it only offers skewers, barbecue on bread, sausage sandwich, ham, cheese and salami. The waiter Wilson showed me the ham sandwich, which I ordered with vinaigrette (R$20). Yummy, but it was still early for dinner and I wanted a pastel. Only one.

It gets pretty serious when you go to examine the beat chart – they, not priestly anatomy, are the specialty of the house.

I don’t like beats too much, but Padre’s… C’s deserve reverence. I stayed between Juma (lemon with passion fruit) and Tieta (passion fruit with lemon), both at R$18 with Velho Barreiro. The waiter told me that Tieta was much tastier, I believed him and I did well. Fresh fruit flavor, the caninha hidden at the bottom and the surprisingly restrained sugar.

Adriano, a friend I dragged to C… do Padre, has a sweeter mouth. He asked Zé Trovão (also R$ 18), with peanuts with coconut foam on top – the appearance refers to the beer collar. I tried it thinking I would hate it, but I really liked it. The guys really know how to make a beat.

Padre’s C… is a good bar, if you measure it by the beats and the beautifully decrepit ambience of the old lounge. The problem is that you can’t get there without absorbing some of the rotten energy of the Baixo Pinheiros Alcohol Walkway.