From the mammas to cosmopolitan restaurants

Abstract

The city of Sao Paulo was officially named as a World Gastronomy Capital, following a widespread campaign which started in the late 1980s and ended with this recognition awarded in 1998. Since then, the city has been trying to establish a foothold as a center of fine cuisine, given it has so many restaurants and a wide variety of cuisines, as a result of the cultural diversity brought by successive waves of immigrants. Italian cuisine acquired notoriety throughout several phases, from the arrival of the first foreigners to the present time. If at first this cuisine was confined within ethnic neighborhoods, with eminently domestic and feminine characteristics, over time it gained visibility, especially in public spaces, through the creation of restaurants. This process shows how flexible a cuisine may be in its expression of “us” and “the others”. Therefore, rather than exhausting such a wide subject, I focus on the links between cuisine, immigration and urban spaces through Italian restaurants in Sao Paulo. I divide the study into three time periods: start of the 20th century, mid-1960s and late-1990s, when the city was declared a World Gastronomy Capital, and profound changes were occurring as a result of globalization.