At 5.30 on every Friday night, the skies over São Paulo grow temporarily dark, and very loud. They are filled up with helicopters, which rise from the 300 helipads fixed to the tops of the city's flashier skyscrapers. They are transporting the city's beau monde to their weekend beach homes. Helicopter is the only way the Brazilian super-rich will travel in 2007. The kidnapping risk is too great for them to go anywhere by car any more. Only the middle classes do car now - so the kidnapping industry has turned its attention to them.
São Paulo is a complicated city. It's sprawling - with a population of 16 million - and severely economically divided. It's got skyscraper horizons, absurd wealth, serious poverty and shocking violence. It's got a luxury goods market worth $US 2.3 billion a year and rising - and yet nearly a third of Paulistas live on less than $2 a day. It's got a glittering social scene, which is perpetuated by a moneyed and beautiful It crowd who party incredibly hard in the bars and restaurants and nightclubs of the city, in between their weekend helicopter jaunts; and it's got a gun-toting gangland culture. On just one Thursday evening in May last year, police shot 14 suspected gang members. But fashion has no issue with danger - on the contrary, fashion loves a bit of danger; fashion thinks danger gives it edge. Which should explain why, right now, São Paulo is considered to be as desperately cool as it is dangerous. Its nightclubs are the sexiest; its women are the most preposterously, expensively glam; its bar and restaurant scene is the freshest, the hottest, the most rumbustiously energetic.
Restaurateur David Ponté wanted to export a chunk of São Paulo cool to the UK (while leaving the dangerous undercurrents of the city's experience firmly in Brazil), and so, in the scrag end of bleakest, drabbest January, he opened Mocotó, five million quid's worth of Brazilian restaurant and boteco which, he claims, is 'London's first ever truly modern Brazilian venue -it's really not a theme place'. Mocotó is located in Knightsbridge in South West London - centre of the known fashion-Sloane universe, in the basement and on the ground floor of the elongated and elegantly minimal glass-fronted space that once housed Oliver Peyton's (ill-fated) Isola. It will, Ponté believes, create a delicious frisson in that terribly prim and English neighbourhood.
Ponté himself is part-Brazilian, part-Sloane. He was born in São Paulo 42 years ago, educated at Eton and spent considerable amounts of time in Paris (where he met restaurateur Mourad Mazouz, with whom he went on to open the super-successful London restaurant Momo in 1997). But Brazil remained a passion for him. He's opened Mocotó, he explains, in response to saudade, 'the precise emotion you feel when you think about Brazil, when you're missing Brazil, when you're missing everything about Brazil'.
Back in São Paulo, Ponté takes Observer Food Monthly on a tour of the city's hippest districts, its hottest scenes. It's not hard to locate the throbbing heart of fashionable São Paulo, he says. You have to find Rogerio Fasano first - because he controls the scene, more or less. Fasano is a fourth-generation hotelier and restaurateur, and a close friend of David Ponté. Fasano's family has run restaurants in Rio and São Paulo for over a century, ever since his great-grandfather Vittorio Fasano emigrated to São Paulo from Italy, and promptly opened an Italian restaurant on Antonio Prado Square, in the heart of the city's most upmarket district. Subsequent generations have expanded the empire. They made money, they lost money, they launched bars and diners and more restaurants until finally, Rogerio entered the arena (after toying briefly with a career in film production). His major contribution to the Fasano legacy so far is the Hotel Fasano, an ultra-chic hotel.
He's a flamboyant character; stylish and decadent and professionally masculine. He's the kind of man who, upon discovering you in a restaurant (which needn't necessarily be one of his) eating a dish he doesn't approve of, will remove it from beneath your nose, and replace it with something 'better'. Unsurprisingly, the Hotel Fasano (which stands on Rua Fasano, a street renamed in honour of Vittorio) is the focus for much of São Paulo's buzziest action. Beautiful people gather in the leather-clad lobby every dusk. They drink high-grade cachaça and nibble chunks of aged parmesan bar snacks. They WAG it up in ostentatious European designer fashion statements (all of which they purchased from Daslu, São Paulo's members-only shopping mall). Ostentatious cheroot-smoking is mandatory. So is flirting.
Rogerio meets us in the bar for cocktails, and ushers us into the hotel's restaurant (also called Fasano) for dinner. He makes sure that we understand what a privilege this is; but he needn't. The buzz surrounding Fasano's restaurant reached us before we left Heathrow. 'It is,' reads one on-line review 'the greatest restaurant in the world.' Wallpaper* magazine - or more properly, the definitive barometer on what is and isn't cool/beautiful on the international stage - loved it. Dinner in Fasano is an elaborate business, incorporating things like a single poached quail's egg encased in a tortellini, and a lot of very good-quality steak tartar. At regular intervals, Rogerio produces a vast white truffle and proceeds to grate it with self-conscious abandon over his guests' dishes. Once distributed, the truffle is placed on a platter and lifted, with ceremony, up onto a nearby shelf, where it crouches over proceedings in a menacing manner. The courses keep coming; they get richer and fancier all the time. No one is allowed down until they've eaten everything. Then there's coffee. And port. And small biscuits. And obscure liqueurs. It's fabulous, but overwhelming - a bit like being mugged by five-star scoff. At 2.30am or thereabouts, Rogerio leaves us, and heads off for the heady decadence of his favourite nightclub: Love Story, a club famous for its transvestite clientele, and also for the prostitutes who hit it and let their hair down when their evening shifts have ended. 'Love Story is madness!' says Rogerio. 'Bye bye!'
The truffle-laced, fine dine-y smartness of Fasano does not qualify as traditional Brazilian food, of course. But then again, it's tricky to pin down the exact nature of Brazilian cuisine, anyway. Brazil is mixed up in a food sense - something David Ponté realised, when he was developing Mocotó. 'There is no such thing as Brazilian cuisine,' he believes. 'The country is so vast and the influences so varied, from Africa, Portugal and the Caribbean, with large Japanese and Lebanese populations in the cities and many Italians down in the south making wine. And the produce from the forests and rivers is so different from anything we see in Europe. [Mocotó] is only scratching the surface.'
Like the rest of Brazil, São Paulo has a wildly diverse population. Five million of its inhabitants are directly or indirectly descended from Italians. Three million are Portuguese to a greater or lesser degree; two million are descended from Spaniards, and a further four-and-a-half million have either African, German, Lebanese or (perhaps, most surprisingly) Japanese ancestry. Accordingly, São Paulo's cuisine is eccentric, eclectic, surprising, and frankly, a bit mental.
It's got oodles of deeply traditional revamped botecos, which serve old-style Brazilian food - fejioda, the black bean and pork stew, Casava chips, bolinhos de bacalhau, or cod balls - and pitchers and pitchers of Bohemia beer. São Paulo's botecos are the Brazilian equivalent of gastropubs.
It's got stalls in the many markets, which do a roaring trade in (local fave) mortadella sandwiches. It's got hole-in-the-wall-dive-bar diners, where you can buy excellent panini-type sandwiches named Beiruts because they're a Lebanese import to São Paulo - toasted pitta bread with thin layers of steak, cheese, tomato and oregano squidged within them. 'These,' says David Ponté, 'are my absolute favourites.' (He's imported the concept, he serves Beiruts in the ground floor bar of Mocotó.) It's got exceptional sushi restaurants, notably the tiny Jun Sakamoto on Rua Lisboa.
And then São Paulo has elements which, like Hotel Fasano, are so fantastically fashionable, they transcend all notions of diverse ethnicity and quirky local influence. There's D.O.M, a restaurant run by Alex Atala, São Paulo's premier celebrity chef, a Jean-Georges for South America, if you like. And there's Skye Bar at Hotel Unique; a rooftop restaurant and bar that is the embodiment of the international language of minimalist chic. Plus there are the myriad champagne bars at the Daslu shopping centre - which has been picketed by local students who revile it as a multi-storeyed, marble-clad, Vuitton-peddling monument to the terrible division between the city's rich and poor. So yes, São Paulo is a complicated city.
After three days touring it with David Ponté, it's hard to imagine how one Knightsbridge restaurant could import the messy, multi-layered, forceful essence of this city, to the UK. But you can't blame Ponté for trying. He's certainly created a beautiful space: the ground floor bar has more than a whiff of Hotel Fasano about it, and Ponté's hired an almost all-Brazilian waiting team. Right now, Ponté thinks a Brazilian clientele would help Brazilify the ambience. 'I hope they come,' he says, somewhat wistfully. 'I hope they come and add their magic.'
· Mocotó, 145 Knightsbridge, London SW1. (020 7225 2300)
