Stool-themed café opens in Liberdade – 11/28/2025 – Restaurants

Sao Paulo

The mere presence of an establishment of the nature of Poop Coffee, which recently opened in Liberdade, São Paulo, makes the question resonate in my mind: why?

That’s what my 13-year-old son asked me when I told him I was going to write about a poop-themed café, with chocolate treats that mimic poop and toilets to accommodate customers.

I tried to fool the boy by telling him that the newspaper had asked me for the letter, but that he had not bought it. He wanted to know why someone would open a business like this and why people would frequent it. I had to admit that I had the vaguest idea of ​​the answers.

Poop Coffee (or Café Cocô) has attracted curious people of all kinds, especially the influential, to the little shop hidden in the basement of a gallery on Rua dos Estudantes.

The coffee (or café as advertised on the menu) comes in a small cup that vaguely resembles a toilet. Chocolate cupcakes topped with brown frosting like a smiling poop emoji.

The same emoji-like stool, in a luxurious version, decorates the interior of the four vases that the house installed, side by side and without connection to the sewer network, so that customers could record videos that would be circulated on social media.

In these films, Instagrammers and TikTokers are shown sitting on a throne as if they were doing number two. They always make witty comments like “this coffee is dirty.”

Even though it was a rainy Monday, we had to wait our turn to tell raunchy, low-budget jokes: There was apparently a famous influencer recording with his entourage when we arrived — myself and Carol Pfeiffer, a Volhaten newspaper reporter.

When the space was cleared, I ordered a cupcake and the only fecal item on the menu: a specialty coffee from Camocim Farm, in Santa Teresa (ES), sold under the Jacu Bird brand.

The jaco is a large bird, typical of the Atlantic Forest, which looks like a cross between a chicken and an eagle.

The coffee in question consists of beans that have been swallowed, digested and expelled by the jaco. According to experts, this process adds complexity of flavor to the coffee, which is sold at surreal prices – at Poop Coffee, a cup costs 35 Brazilian reais.

I couldn’t taste the famous coffee properly as it arrived naked and burned my mouth with the first sip. Furthermore, the quality of food and drink seems to be the least important thing at places like Poop Coffee.

Far from being an original idea, São Paulo’s Café Coco follows a trend of saucy restaurants that has been popping up in Asia for more than a decade. The most famous is Modern Toilet from Taiwan, which pioneered the use of toilets, bidets and urinals as tableware.

These are places that sustain themselves through organic engagement generated by visitors on social media and that take the adage “speak ill, but speak ill of me” literally.

This phenomenon reinforces, at the local level, the transformation that the Liberdade neighborhood has witnessed in recent years. From a gastronomic destination with oriental restaurants for the adventurous (many of which still exist), the area has transformed into a scenic social media town for kids connecting with Japanese and Korean pop culture.

Last Saturday, as we walked through the crowds of Galvao Bueno with our teenage son, we needed to dodge selfies of others, avoid the groups of tourists that took up the entire width of the sidewalk, and avoid a sea of ​​street vendors. Oddly enough, one of them displayed dozens of disturbingly realistic feces on a piece of cloth spread across the asphalt. It is the “poo” of freedom taken to another level.

For this new audience, it doesn’t matter if the food is actually good. What matters is whether it’s mentioned by influencers, whether it’s a drama star’s favorite dish or whether it’s bright yellow like Pokemon Pikachu.

Restaurants with questionable cleanliness are leaving, and clean, fluffy coconuts are in. What matters is experience. No, no, sorry: Khaled recorded the experience on social media. Why people do this to themselves, I don’t know.