Photo by Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Lita
A 44-seat wine bar from a Latin America Best Chef, tucked beside her own restaurant.
Reasons to check it out
- Opened by chef Tássia Magalhães, named Best Chef of Latin America in 2025, and sommelier Danyel Steinle
- Sits beside their restaurant Nelita, sharing the kitchen but running its own small-plates, share-first menu
- A list of roughly 400 to 500 labels, with a fortnightly-rotating by-the-glass selection built around small Brazilian producers
- Near's first Pinheiros pin — the neighborhood has been a coverage gap despite being a Tier 1 São Paulo target
Pinheiros has been a real gap in Near's São Paulo coverage — not for lack of material, but because a neighborhood this dense with genuinely good addresses is hard to pick a first one from. Lita earns it: a small, deliberate wine bar from people who'd already proven themselves next door, rather than a splashy opening banking on buzz alone.
Built next to something that already worked
Lita didn't open cold. Chef Tássia Magalhães and sommelier Danyel Steinle run Nelita, the restaurant next door, and Lita is the wine bar built alongside it — sharing a kitchen and a set of instincts about food, but running its own, smaller menu built for grazing rather than a full sit-down meal. Magalhães was named Best Chef of Latin America in 2025, which is the kind of credential that makes a "the owners also run the restaurant next door" detail worth taking seriously rather than filing as a marketing line.
What the room and the list actually do
CNN Brasil's coverage of the opening describes an intimate, low-key room — an oval counter, soft blue-green walls, around 44 seats — built for the specific experience the name promises: toasting without rushing. That's not incidental framing. A wine bar's whole premise lives or dies on whether the room actually lets you slow down, and by this account Lita is built for exactly that rather than turning tables fast.
The list runs somewhere between 400 and 500 labels, with real depth in small Brazilian producers alongside the expected international names — a detail worth noting for a city where "wine bar" often defaults to an entirely imported list. By-the-glass selections rotate roughly every two weeks, which keeps a repeat visit from feeling identical to the last one. Food comes in small, shareable portions built around Magalhães's kitchen, meant to be ordered across a table rather than as individual mains.
Where it sits
Lita is on Rua Ferreira de Araújo, in the stretch of Pinheiros that's increasingly become its own dedicated food-and-wine strip rather than an overflow from Vila Madalena next door. It's an easy add to a Pinheiros evening that might otherwise be built entirely around Thai E-San's Pinheiros branch, itself proof the neighborhood rewards a place that gets the specifics right rather than chasing a generic "international food" pitch.
Practicalities
Lita runs Tuesday through Thursday from 6pm to midnight, Friday to 1am, Saturday split between a 1-to-5pm afternoon service and an evening service to 1am, and stays closed Sunday and Monday. Given the room's size, arriving without a reservation on a weekend evening is a real risk — this isn't a large space, and it wasn't built to be one.
A note on this page, from Near: no independently verified photo of Lita's own dining room could be sourced for this page, so the hero image shows a Pinheiros street scene instead. If you have a real photo of the space itself, or notice anything here has changed, Near wants to know.
Sources: CNN Brasil Viagem & Gastronomia — "Para brindar sem pressa: conheça o Lita, novo bar de vinhos em Pinheiros", Taste & Fly — "Lita, dos mesmos donos do Nelita, já nasce como um dos melhores bares de vinho de SP", Espaces — Lita Wine Bar listing (menu, hours, address)
