At Aizomê, a stylish Japanese restaurant shrouded by a thick wall of trees just off São Paulo’s main thoroughfare, Avenida Paulista, the food is both recognizable to devotees of Japanese cuisine and distinctly Brazilian. You might find pirarucu, an enormous Amazonian riverfish, in saikyo yaki, a traditional Japanese sweet-miso preparation more commonly used on black cod. Ponzu incorporates tucupi, a tart yellow sauce made from fermented wild manioc, a root native to the Amazon.
“I’m third generation,” says owner Telma Shiraishi, who was born and raised in São Paulo and whose grandparents hail from the Wakayama and Iwate prefectures of Japan. “It doesn’t make sense for me to make a cuisine that is 100% Japanese, bringing 100% of ingredients from Japan.”
Over the past 20 years of leading Aizomê, Shiraishi has been on a journey to determine how these two cultures come together in one place.
What began as an effort toward a fiercely traditional Japanese eatery has evolved into a cuisine that better reflects her own experience, which she calls Nipo-Brazilian, blending Japanese and Brazilian techniques, influences, and ingredients. Of Brazil’s 214 million people, an estimated 2 million people are of Japanese descent, making it the largest community outside of Japan.
The vast majority live in São Paulo
The vast majority live in São Paulo. It’s a history that reaches back to 1907, when the two countries signed an agreement permitting Japanese migration to meet labor needs on coffee plantations in the southern Brazilian states of São Paulo and Paraná. Eventually those immigrants founded agricultural settlements or moved into major cities. The São Paolo neighborhood of Liberdade, often referred to as the city’s Japantown, has been the nucleus of the Japanese Brazilian community since then.
When the first Japanese restaurants emerged, they largely catered to members of their own community. For decades, Japanese cuisine faced stereotyping and suspicion—Brazilians were highly wary of raw fish—but later American imports like huge sushi boats, or rolls that included cream cheese, widened the appeal. For Shiraishi, these restaurants “helped break down prejudices” and accustomed palates to the likes of soy sauce and raw fish.
Now even that era feels like the past: South America’s largest city has grown to contain a kaleidoscope of options when it comes to Japanese restaurants. There is high-end omakase and kaiseki, a raft of izakayas, specialist ramen, udon, tempura, and tonkatsu joints. The scene has hugely diversified, including both truer interpretations of original dishes and a marriage of Brazilian flavors that builds on, rather than flattens, Japanese roots.
There are currently 3,000 Japanese restaurants across São
There are currently 3,000 Japanese restaurants across São Paulo, and they aren’t confined to Liberdade either; they stretch throughout the city, allowing the former enclave to take on a pan-Asian personality. Shiraishi’s Nipo-Brazilian approach isn’t new, but speaks to the way that Japanese immigrants, since they first arrived in the early 20th century, needed to adapt to local ingredients: Papaya root instead of burdock; water hyacinth stalks replacing lotus roots.
Shiraishi recalls her grandmother making sushi with chard leaves, which are far more plentiful in Brazil, instead of seaweed. Unlike the Philadelphia rolls and all-you-can-eat buffets, which Shiraishi felt “didn’t have any connection…to what I grew up eating,” the items now on her menu are reminiscent of the food she was raised on. This spirit lives on in Aizomé’s multicourse tasting menu, and Shiraishi continues to scour the country for ingredients that highlight the history and evolution of Japanese food in Brazil.
Guests might eat chayote marinated in cachaça, a Brazilian spirit, and soy sauce. Mapará, another Amazonian fish, often replaces eel. Her dashi uses dried Brazilian fish rather than katsuobushi, and when possible, local wild mushrooms over shiitake. “The only ingredient [which] we don’t have something similar in Brazil is kombu,” says Shiraishi, referring to the umami-rich sea kelp used in much of Japanese cuisine.
A rising interest in Japanese food beyond sushi
A rising interest in Japanese food beyond sushi has fueled another distinctly Brazilian boom: izakayas. While these casual pubs have existed in the city for decades, it’s only in the past 10 years that they have become some of the city’s most popular hangouts. Izakaya Matsu, an excellent bar in Pinheiros, is perennially packed. In Liberdade, Izakaya Issa and Kintaro have thrived since the 1990s.
Wagner Higuchi runs the latter, a tiny bustling bar that his parents founded in 1993. On a warm, breezy evening, the kind where paulistanos like to spill out onto the streets with ice-cold beers, patrons at Kintaro squeeze side-by-side, drinking Japanese beers and shochu with Yakult, while tucking into an array of dishes served in small aluminium containers. The food, says Higuchi, is a mix of traditional—think braised burdock root and carrot, a side dish that dates back to the Edo period—and those from the “colony,” which is how Japanese Brazilians refer to the agricultural settlements of the early 20th century, when the Japanese first settled and adapted to local ingredients, such as a vinegary marinated tilapia.
Higuchi took over from his parents in 2018 and now runs the bar; his aunt and nephew man the kitchen. “We focus on homemade Japanese food,” says Higuchi. “We evoke the fond memories of our Japanese descendants, the famous ‘batchan’ [grandma] food. It’s important to maintain these traditions because the flavor of this food is unique.” Higuchi adds that a Japanese person visiting from Japan might find some of the dishes unusual, “but for a descendant who remembers the food from home and batchan’s cooking, it can bring back wonderful memories.”
On the northern edge of Avenida Paulista, the elegant, minimalist Kanoê represents another recent shift: toward classic Japanese fine dining.
In 2024, the Michelin Guide returned to São
In 2024, the Michelin Guide returned to São Paulo, and a number of Japanese spots, including Kan Suke, Kazuo, Kuro, and Kanoê, were awarded a star. Many are run by Brazilian-born chefs of Japanese heritage who spent time in Japan in an effort to master the art of sushi. Kanoê is an exclusive omakase, packed each night despite its hefty price tag—the tasting menu costs $268.
Inside, though, chefs expertly slice the finest fish—from Brazil, Japan, and beyond—and serenely cook over induction stovetops. Most revered is the rice, whose provenance is a closely guarded secret and whose result is deeply vinegary and warm enough to melt the most delicate tuna imaginable. On a buzzy Saturday night, sitting across the counter from several supremely confident and concentrated chefs, the pairing of rice, Spanish bluefin tuna, and Niigata salt is arguably the greatest mouthful of sushi in the city—the kind that makes strangers turn and smile to tables beside them.
São Paulo–born owner Tadashi Shiraishi (no relation to Telma) spent years cooking in Japan, Europe, and the US, honing his craft to become one of Brazil’s great sushi chefs. Though deeply rooted in Japanese tradition, he likes to break rules. Tuna is served first because most guests are too full to enjoy the fatty fish at the end of an omakase. It’s a masterstroke, highlighting the fish’s richness before more delicate scallops and hamachi.
These types of high-end Japanese restaurants have emerged,
These types of high-end Japanese restaurants have emerged, in part, thanks to an increasingly wealthy and well-traveled Brazilian populace, says Tadashi, allowing São Paulo’s sushi scene to compete with the world’s gastronomic capitals, like New York. “São Paulo is one of my favorite places to eat Japanese food,” he adds. Though Tadashi uses some Brazilian-grown ingredients, his restaurant has never been explicitly focused on creating Japanese Brazilian cuisine.
Rather, he explains, it has always been about studying and preserving aspects of traditional Japanese cooking to share with a Brazilian audience. “The restaurant aims to operate within principles closely linked to Japanese tradition, respecting technique, seasonality, hospitality, and the creation of flavor within this framework.”
Food among diasporas, perhaps inevitably, can veer further from its origins as people adapt to new countries and cultures intertwine.
As with Indian food in the UK or Mexican cuisine in the US, Japanese food in São Paulo is today defined by a multitude of interpretations. There are, Tadashi says, “formats more adapted to Brazilian tastes [and] those closer to traditions and techniques originally developed in Japan, but with a more personal touch.”
Indeed, Japanese cuisine in Brazil has never been more popular or varied, from the experimental to the fiercely traditional.
There are temakerias in gas stations, beach kiosks
There are temakerias in gas stations, beach kiosks selling sushi, and, still, all-you-can-eat sushi rodízios in every town. “The new generation, they don’t want to eat McDonald’s, they want sushi,” says Telma, referring to the ongoing—and yet, in this case, usurped—Brazilian adoration for international chains. This year Telma will open a new spot in Saúde, a neighborhood in the city’s south that is now home to one of the largest Japanese Brazilian communities.
“As a community of descendants, we have to tell our story.” Thanks to the continued efforts of São Paulo’s vast array of Japanese Brazilian chefs, the options are better—and the story told louder—than ever before.
Source: www.cntraveler.com
