São Paulo's Japanese Kitchens Now Speak in Two Languages
Condé Nast Traveler surveys a city with 3,000 Japanese restaurants, where Amazonian river fish meets saikyo yaki at Aizomê and a $268 omakase at Kanoê holds the classical line.
Condé Nast Traveler reports on the range of Japanese cooking in São Paulo, home to most of the roughly two million Brazilians of Japanese descent, a community that dates to a 1907 labour agreement that sent migrants to coffee plantations in São Paulo and Paraná. The city now counts some 3,000 Japanese restaurants, no longer concentrated in Liberdade.
At Aizomê, off Avenida Paulista, third-generation owner Telma Shiraishi has spent two decades developing what she calls Nipo-Brazilian cooking: pirarucu, the Amazonian river fish, in the sweet-miso saikyo yaki usually given to black cod; ponzu cut with tucupi, the tart fermented manioc sauce; mapará standing in for eel; dashi built on dried Brazilian fish rather than katsuobushi. She opens a second restaurant this year in Saúde.
The counterweight is classical. The Michelin Guide returned to São Paulo in 2024 and starred Kan Suke, Kazuo, Kuro and Kanoê, the last an omakase at $268 run by Tadashi Shiraishi, no relation, who trained in Japan, Europe and the United States. The piece also visits Kintaro, a Liberdade izakaya founded in 1993 and now run by Wagner Higuchi.