Divine pasta in São Paulo

Buttina Restaurant, in São Paulo

Bernard Shaw, prominent Irish writer, said once that there is no love sincerer than the love of food. This is certainly the plain truth in the Buttina Restaurant, a cantina in Pinheiros district that hooks you by their passion for dazzling combinations. Not surprisingly, Ignacio de Loyola Brandão, our prestigious Brazilian writer and journalist, is anusual customer to the place and put his admiration into ingenious words hang on the wall entrance.Likewise, legendary caricaturist Jaguar and not least legendary architect Oscar Niemeyer sparkle around the restaurant. The latter gave a pint of his brilliance on a drawing on the wall representing Rio de Janeiro and the former, engraved his own comical caricature.

 

But do not let this façade elude about another glaring restaurant. The Buttina welcomes you in a grandstand atmosphere of an old house from the 40´s and unfolds itself into ambiences with a distinctive flourish of fruit trees, scattering throughout the pleasant back garden.

The fruit trees all around

 

An amiable gathering of friends would cheer up any suggestion from the menu. The simple elegance of the meals charm the guests as the multitude of tastes comes up for the most relishing moment. Seldom do we try elsewhere dishes as exquisite as spaghetti with cocoa or the legitimate pomodoro souce with cheese raviolli.

 

Filomena Chiarella, the chef and owner, has not been an artist in Italian cuisine for as long as she has without learning a thing or two from her mom, who makes the dough. The homemade dough of the gnocchi that comes out of the hands of the lovely 83 year-old Nona makes it the best in the city, but only available on Fridays and weekends, as well as on the traditional 29^th.

The fabulous gnochi from Nona

Furthermore, the youngest in the staff, the cook Thomas Mancini, it turns out, is not only a talented cook, but also a diligent professional, catering for every whimp of the guests. At some time or another, to escape the boredom of all the range cantinas in the city, pick out the Buttina. It is definetely a celebration of good times and love of food.

Should cars be banned from city centres?

Cars should be banned from the city center at least in the biggest cities because they bring on more problems than benefits. Pollution is the top one major drawback, along with traffic jams and a relentless decrease in local commerce.

Firstly, it is widely known that cars are responsible for the highest levels of carbon dioxide emissions, the most common greenhouse gas. In 2007, the rate stood at 158 grams per kilometer. It accounts for the first cause of global warming in the US and the second in Europe. Hard though it is to believe that despite these numbers, the cars fleet soared to amazing four times the population growth from 1980 to 1990 in Mexico city, for example. A perverse car-oriented society is also found in Moscow where the status of owning a car has been dilapidating seriously the environment world around.

Secondly, cars humper traffic be them parked or roaming on the streets where public transportation should be the priority mean of commuting. Even after the implementation of urban toll and license plate rotation scheme, London and São Paulo locals have reached peaks of immobility in their centers in the last decades. The squandering money in São Paulo´s economy due to traffic jams stands at 10% of the GDP. London has fallen back on bicycle routes and São Paulo has tried hard to work up subway and buses lines.

In addition to that, local commerce looses pedestrians and consequently sales volume decreases. City center commerce tends to deteriorate because it turns into simply to a passage area. What´s more, local residents are forced to move out of the city center making the area much more devaluated.

All the problems can be wrapped up by two words: public transportation, to the detriment of cars in the city centres. At any rate, it should be promoted the use of bicycles and companies should incentive the carpool until subway stations around the area

Is it possible to adopt bikes in Sampa?

 The use of bikes in the cold London has risen 100% from 2000 to 2005 acording to this piece of news from BBC . The Transport for London´s network ( TfL) has built 450 km of routes so far, the LCN+ routes, and other 400 km are expected for the next years.

They can count on good facilities and a respectable budget from TfL´s, naturally, as well as cycle parking spaces on the streets, new cycle racks for kids at schools and a journey planner for you select your best route.

 Here in São Paulo, things work a bit different. Cycling is for ballsy characters, and we depend on moviments like the Bicicletada dos Executivos, held last year, to arise awareness of the possibility of adopting a bike as a mean of transportation .

 Marco Antonio Correia kept a quite interesting blog on the topic: Bike é meio de transporte that can set you off to other blogs and sites, like the excellent Vá de bike , from Willian Cruz. This is a very nice job, and it would be wonderful if they could update them more often to spread this healthy, happy, environmental culture in our craze city.

What do you think, can we implement cycling routes in Sampa? Where?