Tabuleiro do Acarajé, Consolação

Vatapá, acarajé, caruru: this exotic mouthful of sounds, ripe for rolling around the tongue, is matched only by the exoticism of the ingredients themselves, which come together to make one of the most emblematic dishes in north-eastern Brazil's superb cuisine. A street-food staple in Salvador, the capital of the state of Bahia and the epicentre of Afro-Brazil, the deep-fried, black-eyed-pea patties (acarajé) are split and filled with vatapá (a thick yellow paste made from ground shrimp and peanuts, coconut milk and thickened palm oil), then crowned with a handful of shrimp and a dollop of caruru, a saucy little condiment made from okra. The acarajé at this five-square-metre hole-in-the-wall joint at the top of a bar-packed street close to Mackenzie University are served with grace, charm and warm smiles by Fátima and Miri de Castro. The Bahian sisters, who abandoned rat-race São Paulo careers to launch this place instead, taught themselves to make acarajé over a period of intense experimentation before opening in early 2013. And, if the happy, friendly throng that gathers here nightly for the £2.60 snacks is anything to go by, they've cracked it.
• Rua Dr Cesário Mota Jr 611, +55 11 4301 4363, facebook.com/tabuleirodoacaraje

Acrópoles, Bom Retiro

Still under the command of 96-year-old owner Thrassyvoulos Petrakis, who worked as a waiter here for a decade before buying the business in the early 1970s, this well-loved classic has been thriving since 1959, in the heart of Bom Retiro, one of São Paulo's most traditional immigrant neighbourhoods. There's often a wait outside on weekends; best to just order a bottle of ice-cold beer and consider it part of the experience. Once you're settled in the simple, pretty blue-and-white restaurant, start with a generous half-portion of Greek salad (R$22, £5.80), or the starter platter (entrada completa, £9), with soft cheese, pickles, aubergine, hummus, potato salad and tender chunks of octopus. To order your main course (from £7.50), squeeze through the tightly packed tables to the kitchen and select whatever catches your eye from an array of dishes that includes roast lamb, salmon with seafood risotto, stuffed cabbage, and sublime stuffed squid (£14), which comes with tomato rice studded with succulent octopus. The moussaka (£8.50) is heavenly: crunchy and cheesy on top, and intensely savoury below. A fat slice of custardy galaktoboureko (£1.80), with an exquisite filo top, should finish you off nicely.
• Rua da Graça 364, +55 11 3223 4386, restauranteacropoles.com.br

Mocotó, Vila Medeiros

It's a schlep to get there: Mocotó is some 40 minutes from downtown São Paulo by car (or take the blue line metro to Tucuruvi, then it's 10 minutes in a taxi). But if you can manage it, and if you can handle a 40-minute to two-hour wait for a table at weekends – sipping delicious, creative caipirinhas while you wait – this is a don't-miss chance to try north-east Brazilian food at its very best. The restaurant, which appeared (at no 16) in last year's list of 50 best restaurants in Latin America, is run by Rodrigo Oliveira alongside his father José, the formerly humble boteco's original owner. It is famous for faithfully produced classic dishes that are somehow, every time, twice as good as you've ever had them before – and cheaper than seems possible for pricey São Paulo. Try the escondidinho de carne seca (£6.60), a cassava-topped shepherd's pie made with jerked beef, or the sumptuous, melting joelho de porco (pork shank, £9.80), with a pile of cuscuz (Brazilian couscous). Ordering a procession of dishes to share over a long afternoon's grazing is the perfect way to go here: try crunchy cubes of fried tapioca with a sweet and spicy dipping sauce, and out-of-this-world torresmo (meaty, homemade pork scratchings, £1.30). Oliveira recently opened a sister restaurant next door, Esquina Mocotó, with a fancier menu and slightly higher prices, which has been received just as rapturously as the original by SP's gastronomics brigade.
• Avenida Nossa Senhora do Loreto 1100, +55 11 2951 3056, mocoto.com.br

Chi Fu, Liberdade

Home to what's considered the largest Japanese community outside Japan, São Paulo is blessed with hundreds of Japanese restaurants, serving sukiyaki, ramen (lamen) and sushi galore. Search for Chinese food, however, and your options are weirdly limited, which makes Chi Fu, a two-storey palace of cheap, highly authentic Chinese cuisine in Liberdade, the heart of Japanese São Paulo, all the more precious. If Portuguese is a problem for you, relax: most of Chi Fu's staff speak barely any either, or affect not to. So make what sense you can of the vast menu, lavish with photos, or go for the steamed carp (£8) or tilapia (£9) with ginger; a pile of noodles (massas) with beef, pork, prawns or mixed seafood (carne, lombo, camerão or fruto do mar, £7); or a huge platter of spicy, saucy squid (lula com molho, £10.50). Expect to be steered to the upper floor, past a ground floor packed with feasting Chinese families and – unless you're in a similarly large group – to share one of the huge tables, complete with lazy susan. Slices of watermelon appear when the staff decide you're done, complete with a bill, handwritten in Chinese. Note: no cards accepted.
• Praça Carlos Gomes 200, +55 11 3112 1698, no website

Ella, Pinheiros

Opening on a nondescript Pinheiros street in March 2013, and run by chef-proprietor Alexandre Romano – who has stints at some of the city's finest Italian restaurants under his belt, including the incomparable Fasano – Ella is a compact, deliciously affordable revelation. Popular with journalists and staff from Editora Abril – the offices of Brazil's magazine leviathan are just down the road – Ella offers silky, exquisite homemade pasta, springy gnocchi and tender milanesas (breaded steak in a superbly crunchy coating). Best of all, there's a three-course daytime menu that could be the best-value lunch in town. About £8.80 gets you a choice of starter from a menu that changes weekly – our choice was polenta topped with duck ragu, or leafy mozzarella salad – a main course that might be pasta, risotto or the aforementioned milanesa, served with fat strands of bigoli pasta in sage butter, plus dessert. From the a la carte menu, the tender pink beetroot tortelli (£10.50), scattered with scraps of walnut and wilted sage and filled with ricotta with the option of foie gras, rather than sage butter – is simply unforgettable. To finish, choose between a thick slice of pineapple or a pot of bright white pannacotta in a fruity, vividly ruby broth.
• Rua Costa Carvalho 138, +55 11 3034 1267, facebook.com/ellarestaurante

Rinconcito Peruano, Santa Efigênia

A little slice of Lima in a very old, very run-down part of central São Paulo, Rinconcito Peruano ("little corner of Peru" in Spanish) is humble, unpretentious, cheap as chips, and almost invariably rammed. There's no sign, just an open doorway and a flight of stairs; so in you go, and carry on upwards, past the main salon to the breezy top floor. The varied menu features soul-warming soups (try the Minuta, £3.20, or fried chicken and Peruvian-Chinese fried rice, chaufa), but the fresh, delicious ceviche is the king of dishes here, and it comes in small, medium or king-size servings (from £7-£26), piled on a bed of potato and sweet potato and topped with fat golden kernels of toasted, crackly corn. The neighbourhood is extremely insalubrious, so this is not a place in which to wander about, and certainly not at night. Go for a slap-up lunch instead, or if it's night-time, take a taxi right to the door.
• Rua Aurora 451, +55 11 3361 2400, facebook.com/rinconcitoperuano

Sabores de Mi Tierra, Pinheiros

With his well-regarded Suri Ceviche Bar already going famously, chef Dagoberto Torres opened this tiny Colombian joint with his aunt Magdalena in early 2013 in the garage of a Pinheiros house just opposite the city's Goethe Institute. The menu is simple: arepas (flat, white corn bread) and patacones (flattened, fried discs of plantain that hold their topping perfectly, rather than collapsing at the first bite) with a choice of toppings: shredded, stewed beef or chicken; linguiça sausage with onion; baked ham (pernil); cheese; or beans with guacamole and pork scratchings. The plump, nicely spongy arepas are a bargain at £2.60 each (or £1.80 with just cheese), making this a popular spot for after-work get-togethers over snacks and cold beers, to which you help yourself from the fridge.
• Rua Lisboa 971, +55 11 3083 3114, facebook.com/pages/Sabores-de-Mi-Tierra

SESC, Pinheiros

One of Brazil's finest institutions, or collection of them, SESCs are highly egalitarian not-for-profit arts and leisure centres that usually contain sports facilities and exhibition and performance spaces, as well as packed programmes of courses and workshops. They're also reliably good places to find affordable canteens, and this one, serving some 1,400 lunches a day, is particularly recommended. Run on Brazil's popular self-service, per-kilo model, the buffet features a fine variety of savoury, salad and vegetable dishes, as well as a coffee counter, where you can polish off an espresso and a slice of cake before ducking in to one of the exhibitions elsewhere in this tall building. The price-per-kilo for visitors is about £7 – it's lower for SESC members and for workers in the goods, services and tourism sectors, whose employers' tax-deductible contributions are the basis of SESC's funding.
• Rua Paes Leme 195, +55 11 3095 9400, sescsp.org.br

Bar do Biu, Pinheiros

A browse round the Saturday bric-a-brac market at Praça Benedito Calixto followed by an afternoon's lounging at nearby Bar do Biu is something of a São Paulo institution. This deceptively spacious boteco is an exemplary specimen of the no-frills bars/lunchrooms to be found the length and breadth of Brazil, where you can get a square meal (prato feito or prato comercial) from about £3.50, featuring your choice of meat with a serving of salad, fries, rice, beans and farofa – toasted cassava meal. Here at Bar do Biu, grab a pavement table if you see one, or make your way past the cool, tattooed crowd to the back, where there's plenty of seating. Order maybe a caipirinha (£3) then get down to business with a slap-up feijoada (Brazil's emblematic pork-and-bean stew complete with mixed grill, shredded kale and farofa, £6) or the house speciality, baião de dois (£9). That's rice and black-eyed peas jumbled with shreds of jerked beef and shards of bacon, sausage and squeaky queijo de coalho cheese – enough for two, especially if you order a pork chop on the side. Shake some bottled butter or hot sauce over it, and send it on its way with an ice-cold bottle of Brahma (£2.40).
• Rua Cardeal Arcoverde 772, +55 11 3081 6739, bardobiu.com.br

Yamaga, Liberdade

Thanks to the city's million-strong Japanese and Brazilian-Japanese population, sushi and sashimi are at the heart of São Paulo's gastronomic industry, a major food group for food-loving Paulistanos, who appear to need regular fixes of the stuff to stay happy and healthy. Revered masters of the art, such as Jun Sakamoto, of the eponymous restaurant, command eye-watering prices, but there's something for every budget in Liberdade, SP's Japantown. And if affordability, simplicity and quality are in order, old-school Yamaga is a consistently reliable choice. The wide menu boasts ramen, teppanyaki, yakisoba and more, plus sushi sets ranging from £3-£7. Consider a combinado, which comes with a mix of sushi and sashimi plus a hot dish of your choice (gyoza, tempura) for £12. It's technically for one person, but if you order some of the exceedingly tasty miso soup on the side, there'll be plenty for two.
• Rua Tomás Gonzaga 66, Liberdade, +55 11 3275 1790, restauranteyamaga.com.br