Plenty of restaurants abroad call themselves tapas bars. Fewer build the whole place around the Spanish bar counter, the barra, and then spend years pushing the cooking further without losing that feel. Huevos de Oro in São Paulo is one of them.
From tapas house to gastronomic bar
Huevos de Oro opened in 2019 in Pinheiros, one of the busiest restaurant neighbourhoods in Brazil. It started as a specialised tapas house. The founders took the Spanish barras they admired as the model: a tavern where the food, the wine and the service all come out of the same idea of how people eat and drink in Spain.
Over time it moved up a level. Today it sits somewhere between a tavern and a restaurant, with a relaxed room but restaurant-level cooking and service. The house motto says it plainly: "a bit of a bar, a bit of a restaurant."
Who is cooking
The kitchen is run by chefs and partners Tatiane Bertone and Larissa Desiderio, both graduates of Le Cordon Bleu São Paulo. They reworked the menu while keeping the dishes regulars come back for, and they added more of Spain's regional cooking to it.
What is on the menu
The core of the menu is a list of Spanish classics, many of them from different corners of the country:
- Tortilla de patatas, the potato and egg omelette served in almost every bar in Spain.
- Pan tumaca, the Catalan habit of rubbing bread with ripe tomato, then adding olive oil and salt.
- Huevos rotos, fried eggs broken over fried potatoes, often with ham or chorizo. Given the restaurant's name, it is hard to skip.
- Asturian cachopo, two breaded veal fillets sandwiching ham and cheese.
- Seafood paella.
- Rabo de toro, slow-braised oxtail.
- The Bomba de la Barceloneta, the house's award-winning version of the Barcelona tapa: a fried ball of mashed potato filled with meat.
Alongside those, the kitchen adds new dishes drawn from different Spanish regions. If you are going as a group, the easiest approach is the Spanish one: order several plates for the table and share.
Sherry, vermouth and a Spanish wine list
The drinks follow the same line. Most of the wine list is Spanish, and the bar gives particular attention to sherry and vermouth, including cocktails made with both. The restaurant sees this as a way to introduce Brazilian diners to Spanish wine culture. A dry fino or manzanilla with a plate of ham or fried food is one of the simplest pairings in Spanish drinking, and a good way in. Our sherry guide covers the styles if you want to know what to ask for.
What the restaurant is aiming for
The owners say they want Huevos de Oro to become a reference point for Spanish food in Brazil and to show diners more of Spain than the handful of dishes everyone already knows. In practice that means cachopo and rabo de toro on the same menu as paella, and a bar that takes sherry seriously.
Other Spanish addresses in São Paulo
If you are building a Spanish evening or two in the city, a few other venues in our directory are worth knowing:
- Nit Bar de Tapas on Rua Oscar Freire, opened in 2019 by chef Óscar Bosch. It won a Michelin Bib Gourmand in 2020.
- Pintxos Bar, also in Pinheiros, built around Basque-style pintxos, with Basque cider on the drinks list.
- Paellas Pepe in Ipiranga, cooking Spanish food in São Paulo since 1990 under chef Pepe López.
You can browse the full list on our São Paulo page. Huevos de Oro is at Rua Pedroso de Morais, 267, in Pinheiros.
