Nonna Rosa: How São Paulo chefs democratized fine dining with accessible Italian cuisine

Marcelo Muniz spent years working the dining rooms of São Paulo's most demanding restaurants—places like Fasano and Gero, where the clientele expected flawless service alongside exceptional food. By 2019, he and André Silva, who had met through the city's fine dining circuit, decided to build something different: a restaurant that delivered the same rigor and hospitality as those establishments, but at prices ordinary people could actually afford.

They called it Nonna Rosa, and they opened it in November 2019 in Jardins, a neighborhood saturated with established restaurants. The location itself was a gamble—a storefront that had housed a series of failed ventures, in a street where residents didn't want another dining option. The partners countered skepticism with strategy. An executive menu priced at roughly ten dollars was designed to fill lunch service and create a foothold for dinner orders. The margins were tight by design. They were betting that if they could prove the concept worked, the neighborhood would follow.

Four months in, the pandemic shut them down. Without a loyal customer base, without a chef of their own—they were still operating under the technical direction of Rodolfo de Sanctis—and without revenue, Muniz and Silva pivoted to delivery. They reduced their team to five people and began cooking for clients in their homes. What happened next was unexpected: when the restaurant finally reopened, customers said they knew Nonna Rosa only from the delivery packaging. The brand had taken shape in people's minds before they ever sat at a table.

"That's when we understood we actually owned this business and had to make it work," Silva said later. By 2022, with operations stabilized, they began a careful repositioning. The ten-dollar executive menu climbed to seventeen dollars. Average tickets rose to between forty-five and fifty-seven dollars per person with drinks. The cost of goods sold—a critical metric in Italian restaurants—held steady between twenty-eight and thirty percent, the healthy range for the category in São Paulo. An appetizer that had cost four dollars now sold for fourteen. The increases worked because the brand had already taken root.

Service remained the obsession. Muniz believed customers would return even if the food disappointed them, but no amount of good cooking could overcome poor hospitality. The operational model was borrowed directly from Fasano: at least one partner present in the dining room daily, two or three senior staff members per shift in overlapping rotations, weekly team training. The wait times—sometimes stretching two hours during peak service in Jardins—were treated as part of the experience, a signal that people wanted to be there.

In May 2025, they opened a second location in Itaim Bibi, a residential neighborhood without an established dining reputation. This time, the brand preceded the opening. The new restaurant incorporated elements absent from Jardins: cocktails, private events, a different rhythm. On a recent Friday, the average ticket reached seventy-seven dollars, compared to forty-seven dollars in the original location. Wine consumption was higher. People lingered longer and ordered full courses—appetizer, main, dessert, drink—rather than moving between venues as they did on Oscar Freire Street.

The two locations now employ nearly seventy people. Muniz argued that the restaurant industry's labor complaints stemmed more from poor management than from a shortage of workers. Nonna Rosa's approach included weekly training, professional development plans, and measured tolerance for mistakes. The highest-paid employee in the company, he noted, had started as a server. The consolidated operation generated an eight-percent EBITDA margin on cash flow, with the Itaim location moving into profitability within its first six months. Shared kitchen functions—pastry from one location, fresh pasta from the other—kept combined food costs in the same healthy range.

The original plan had called for five locations. That ambition has been shelved. "We realized that was excessive," Muniz said. "Now we're thinking maybe three locations, but very well consolidated." The growth strategy has turned vertical instead: catering for weddings and corporate events, services that leverage existing infrastructure without multiplying physical restaurants. For 2026, they project monthly revenue between two hundred four thousand and three hundred twenty-six thousand dollars across both locations, with events contributing to the total.