At 40 years old, the Ritz is the best tradition in São Paulo, without ever losing its freshness

Anyone who sits down at any restaurant in São Paulo for dinner and asks for a glass of wine to accompany the dish doesn’t know, but that didn’t exist until 1980 in São Paulo. Drinking wine was an expensive habit of wealthy people and often older people.

People from my generation, who were teenagers in the 1980s and 1990s, even more people like me, who have no father, mother, grandparents or European immigrant grandparents, did not drink wine. Young man’s drink was beer. The older ones drank whiskey. Or dribbles, for fun, in the caipirinha.

Then, in 1981, the Ritz opened on Alameda Franca, close to Rua Augusta. The Ritz wasn’t actually the first place in São Paulo to serve wine by the glass — that was the Sandwich, which opened in 1980 at Oscar Freire, Maria Helena Guimarães’ first restaurant, Marilove, with her husband and life partner, Arthur Guimarães, and partner Antônio Henrique Ferreira.

It was Arthur who had the idea of ​​bringing this novelty he saw in London to São Paulo, and Marilove, of course, loved it. Just like everyone who realized that it was fundamental, one of those things that, when you find out, you don’t know how you lived without it.

The Sandwich was soon too small for its success, and the following year it was unfolded and turned into the Ritz. I, who was lucky enough to have an older sister who didn’t mind carrying the youngest when I went out at night, started going there a few years later—at 13. And then, everything changed. For me, for the city, for the cariocas who came to visit and were drooling over that mix of Baixo Leblon with London and New York that we had in the middle of Jardins.

Young people, old people, rich people, alternative people, artists, intellectuals, journalists, punks, skateboarders, Brazilian rockers, gays spun through those revolving doors. And inside, spread out on marble-topped tables or sitting on red sofas, everyone was the same. Even the waiters, the waitresses, the managers, there was no caste system at the Ritz, it was as if we were part of a community there. And, in a way, it was. Is still.

In the early years, the Ritz was a mess. I, who was the youngest regular among the regulars, never had the money to pay for the coleslaw hot dog I had on the menu at the beginning. No problem, just sign the note. But, in 1990, Sérgio Kalil arrived to put the house in order. Aged 28, very kind, good-humored, intelligent, hot, he told her straight away that the story of hanging the bill was in the past. Just like my dear hot dog…

We became friends right away. I made two windows at the Ritz, one all with colored balls, and the other with flying paper fish that had chicks and little pussies. I tried most of the new menu—and the drink list, written in chalk on the triangular blackboard above the bar.

One night I asked if he would let me waitress for a day. He did, and my friends were so amused that they filled the tables asking me for food and drinks, that I changed everything, but everyone had fun. I earned good tips, had lots of laughs.

And Sérgio Kalil had an idea: what if other attendees had the same experience? He invented a party, “Os Clientes São Garçons”, a success so resounding that it had to be repeated for several years. Until it got too big, the street with so many people stopped, the list of those who wanted to serve was immense, and the list of those who arrived to be served, then, was infinite. Neighbors called the police, it was a mess. And it had to end.

Meanwhile, my life was happening. I lived in Australia for a year, went to circus school, went to philosophy school, met Sérgio, married Sérgio (Kalil was godfather), became a journalist, wrote books (some I released at the Ritz). I had daughters, two girls, who will turn 8 on the next 15th. And guess which restaurant they went to the most in their lives?