São Paulo, capital of gastronomy and fear.
Restaurants catering to the upper, middle, and lower classes have been mercilessly robbed in the country's largest city; Governor Geraldo Alckmin's police force says it has few leads on the perpetrators of the 17 robberies targeting restaurants this year; the series of robberies is already impacting business and threatening an industry that generates thousands of jobs and millions in taxes.
247 – La Tambouille, a Michelin-starred restaurant catering to an upper-class clientele, is one of the prides of São Paulo's gastronomy. As are the pizzas adorned with premium tomato sauce from Pizzaria do Brás, the exclusive creations of chef Carla Pernambuco at the Carlota restaurant, and the long-established Cantina Gigio, one of the first to gain fame in the Brás neighborhood.
Restaurants of this caliber have lent São Paulo the sweet reputation of being the gastronomic capital of South America, by far the city with the richest and most varied options for eating out in the entire country. These titles guarantee the sustainability of an industry that employs thousands of people and boosts the economy by generating millions of reais in taxes every month.
Alongside more than a dozen other gastronomic establishments in the city, Tambouille, Bráz, Carlota, and Gigio now have something in common: all of them have been targets of robberies by bandits in the last ten days. Since the beginning of the year, no fewer than 17 restaurants in São Paulo have suffered this type of attack, almost always with the same modus operandi. At the end of the night, when the cash register is full and the last customers are finishing their meals, the robbers arrive, terrorize and empty the wallets of the diners, steal the contents of the cash register, and leave unharmed. The most that has happened are sporadic – and fruitless – police chases.
The Civil Police are investigating whether it is a single gang that is carrying out the robberies. According to Detective Paul Henry Verduraz, from the 15th Police District, where the attack on Tambouille was registered, there are several similarities. "They are young criminals who act quickly and do not cover their faces," Verduraz stated at the time. The number of robbers was also similar, around five.
In practice, these mass robberies are transforming the gastronomic capital into a capital of fear. As a result, restaurant business, which has increased its investments in private security, has declined, while its coffers are becoming heavier with the hiring of security guards and electronic monitoring equipment. Ultimately responsible for public safety in the state and the capital, Governor Geraldo Alckmin has yet to find an adequate response to the audacity of the criminals. There are rumors that they are acting in the shadow of a kind of undeclared work-to-rule action by the São Paulo Civil Police, whose rank and file are reportedly dissatisfied with the human resources policy developed by Secretary Antonio Ferreira Pinta of Public Security. He is said to have prematurely retired influential delegates and distributed officers to strategic precincts without more thorough consultation with the police force. The response is a certain leniency in the investigations of the mass robberies, which have already totaled 17 since the beginning of the year. The most Alckmin has done on this issue so far is promise "tough prison sentences" for those arrested. But that seems to be insufficient. The general expectation is for more robberies in the coming days, given how easily they have been committed.