Riviera, bar opened in 1949, reopens in São Paulo and is now open 24 hours a day

Closed since the beginning of the pandemic, in March 2020, the Riviera bar will reopen from Wednesday, the 23rd, after receiving public for test events last weekend. The traditional address took advantage of these almost two years of hiatus to reformulate the atmosphere, the menu and, above all, the service: now the house is open 24 hours a day.

Since 1949 on the corner of Avenida Paulista and Rua Consolação, the Riviera marked an era in São Paulo’s bohemia, especially between the late 1960s and early 1990s. It was closed in the early 2000s, but resumed by the duo Facundo Guerra and Alex Atala in 2013. Currently, it is one of the addresses under the responsibility of the Fábrica de Bares group, which has been dominating the São Paulo pubs and which also runs classics such as Bar Brahma, Bar Léo and Filial.

The new menu of the house has options for breakfast, lunch, happy hour, dinner and dawn. Among the novelties are the shrimp cocktail, the asparagus lasagna and the lobster with fries. The menu available for night owls has snacks such as fried chicken, hamburgers, milkshakes and onion soup.

There is also a section of bratty pizzas named after artists who frequented the house —the cartoonist from sheet Laerte, for example, baptizes the recipe with zucchini and gorgonzola. Angeli, also from the newspaper, didn’t win pizza with her name, but her character Rê Bordosa, who was born in Riviera, did. It goes with burrata, tomato and basil topping.

The cocktail shakers are also shaking under new supervision, with the arrival of Mestre Derivan at the house — he worked on drinks at other locations at Fábrica de Bars, such as Filial and Blue Note, but is now exclusive to Riviera. The letter lists classic recipes, caipirinhas, smoothies and has a section dedicated to cocktails signed by guests.

With the return of the bar and the drinks, the bar will continue writing its history and, who knows, help create new scenes that have marked the city. Like the time Mazzola went to Riviera, in 1958, when he was a Palmeiras player and went to the bar to mourn a historic defeat by Santos, 7-6. Or the visit, in the following decade, of Chico Buarque, who chose Riviera to celebrate the victory of “A Banda” at the 1966 Song Festival.