Yes, as a foreigner you must go through a rigorous process to open a bar in Brazil, including a psychological sanity examination and filling out a 3 page declaration explaining why exactly you are so eager to lose all of you money.

Okay, if you're reading this still then the answer you are probably looking for is no. You don't have to buy a liquor license like you would in the States and there are permits you need to run any public business but these permits are trivial and in order to open a bar in brazil you just have to be foolish enough to try.

Let us know how you do then, mate.  Best wishes.

Hey tech-spec,
I think amerifag response was part in jest but he is partly right.

In Brazil you do not need a license to open a bar (not like in other countries), which means anybody can open one including the guy that sees you making money and he will open a lil barzinho across the street from you and sell his beer for pittance and fiado,  which means the competition can drive somebody out of business eventually.

Sorry for the negativity, I've never heard of a stripper bar in Brazil, the whole concept that you can look but you can't touch doesn't exist here and it would be a miracle if you could change the culture to get used to less than what everybody else is providing. So let's go for the gusto and talk hooker bar. Running a hooker bar in brazil is really not that hard. You don't have to worry about paying off warring police tribes who each will you hit you up separately, you won't need to hire bands of armed thugs to come and retrieve all of the cash that everyone knows will be accumulating in the house. You won't need to cater to every judge, mayor, cousin and son of cousin that comes in and will expect to be able to have sex with the girls without paying and without condoms. The girls are super easy to work with and have a really good work ethic, they'll never drag you down with their personal problems. Most of them come from good families, hardly any of them ever have any drug problems or jealous boyfriends who are gangsters. You never have to worry about the bad press or the media hounding you because one of these girls just vanishes and is mysteriously killed, these things almost never happen in Brazil, and if they do it's because someone didn't have the right attitude, plan and idea. Here's the deal tech-spec, I'm intentionally being negative because you are asking questions in the wrong place, if you really are intent in opening a bar in Brazil you have to come down here and ask people face to face because your model for what running a bar should be like doesn't apply in Brazil. I sat this weekend with 4 different gringoes who each opened a bar or restaurant and lost all their money. We realized that if they would have taken all the money they spent on the bars and just put it in the bank accumulating interest all of them would have been so much richer. The problem is that it's hard to make money with these types of businesses in Brazil, even if you manage to make a place successful and fill it with people, it could still fail because the profit margins on the drinks are so low and the expenses are so high. As somebody who has lived in Brazil for 5 years and watched numerous gringoes open places at every price level from hole in the wall bar to mega club, I can tell you at a minimum it's a bigger f**king headache than you can imagine and not the fun dream in paradise you may be thinking of, at a maximum you could easily ruin your life, and if you are in the average category you might get off easy by losing a whole bunch of money. If you decide you still want to do it, I recommend you live here for at least 6 months before you commit to the idea, and you must be able to speak portuguese pretty well, otherwise you will get taken to the cleaners. Brazil is not for amateurs.

my two cents.

Okay I don't think you would be breaking any laws if you had a stripper bar. Prostitution is legal in Brazil but pimping is not, stripping doesn't fall under either of these, I've seen live sex shows in São Paulo and it really didn't seem like that big of deal. What you are proposing of course is much more minor. It would also depend a lot on where you are, if you are in like Rio or São Paulo then it's no big deal, but there are more conservative parts of Brazil like in the South where this might not get a warm reception. Still, I don't think you have anything legally to be concerned about if the girls are just taking off their clothes but not having sex with the clients. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty certain about this. You're not breaking the law with a stripper bar.

That being said, I don't think breaking the law is the biggest concern if you try to do something like this. Brazil is not a country of laws it's more of country of who you know. There's a whole world of headaches that you will be dealing with but the law thing probably won't be one of them.