Discover the Mercadinho do Lasanha, a dirty walk that turned into a popular nightclub in the center of São Paulo.

From time to time, a new ecosystem emerges to house São Paulo’s nocturnal fauna. This year, the chosen one was a small market, which turned into a club and one of the hottest meeting places in the center of the capital, with visitors ranging from modern anonymous to singer Otto and American drag Violet Chachki, winner of the reality RuPaul’s Drag Race .

Open for six months in Vila Buarque, Mercadinho do Lasanha has a literal name —it really is a small market and its owner, named Marcelo Mota, is the guy called Lasanha.

In a short time, the place had its status raised to that of a point in the region. With a loudspeaker and LED lights, the space gained an improvised track that receives people who usually hang around until the late hours. “Some days I get home at 11 am”, says Lasanha.

He says that, before the pandemic, his business was located in Largo do Arouche and already worked as a kind of warm-up for people who frequent LGBTQIA+ clubs in the Republic region.

With the financial squeeze caused by the period of closing of the commerce, Mota transferred the point to Jaguaribe street, in a place that was also his home. In addition to the shelves with toilet paper rolls and deodorants and refrigerators with drinks and frozen lasagna that earned him his nickname, he made available some tables, began serving also as a cafeteria to extend the opening hours during the pandemic and invited an artist friend to give a color on the ceiling.

“I gave him an idea, but I said he could do whatever he wanted,” says Lasanha. The result was a painting with many roses and a sentence written in perspective that says, in large letters: “Mercadinho do Lasanha. Welcome”.

While many trendy places in São Paulo are betting on non-stapleable neons, the design without great pretensions has become one of the house’s hits. “People are asking and I’m already looking to change the text to ‘welcome’,” he says, referring to the fashion for neutral language.

The request illustrates the main characteristic of the place: the synergy with the LGBTQIA+ audience, which was, after all, who turned the pe-sujo into a disputed ballad.

“We were looking for a place to have a beer in the beginning of October. Then a friend passed by the Mercadinho do Lasanha and said: ‘people, I just found the best place in the world,'” recalls artistic director Gabriela Bandeira . “She said that there is a wonderful painting on the ceiling there, the owner lets us put on music, we are doing what we want.”

Bandeira thought the place would be perfect to host an old project, the Festa Ruim — an LGBTQIA+ event which, in her words, is a “party that celebrates the entire community, because a good party is a party with a fag in a bag.” “We talked about it, but he said he didn’t understand anything about parties. But I told him to take it easy, that we would help,” he says.

The movement started to grow in the bar, already transformed into a club, until the Halloween event. “Out of nowhere, 20 shoes arrived in costume. He asked what was going on, and I said: ‘we’re going to have a Halloween party here today, Marcelo.’ He laughed a lot,” recalls Bandeira. On that day, the movement was so big, that the director had to help with the cashier at the bar. Another of the guests took a hand in the stock.

Shortly thereafter, the place blew up. Today Mercadinho do Lasanha is open from Wednesday to Sunday throughout the night, filling the sidewalks on the street. The move meant that the people who attend the parties no longer needed to work there: now, Lasanha has a team of five employees and says it has already hired one more person to take care of cleaning the bathroom.

Today, the business already has a party schedule with events scheduled until the end of January and is a meeting point for the LGBTQIA+ community and creative people who work with communication and art that usually frequent the region. Although the floor is full of people dancing among cleaning products, the favorite place is the street.

And that’s why Lasanha predicts it could have problems with noise and people on the street soon.

Therefore, he says that his main plan now is to improve the structure of the place and manage to find a way to bring the public inside. And he guarantees that, despite having discovered the talent for the night, he still wants to have the market during the day. “I still want to meet the lady who needs to buy milk,” he says. “But I think it’s really cool that you go into a club and buy a toilet paper — or go out and buy a toilet paper and suddenly find yourself in a club.”