Other
Ivan Ralston
Chef and owner
- Discipline
- Other
i. Biography
In 2026, Tuju earned Three Michelin stars. The result brought added scrutiny to a body of work built around place, discipline, and restaurant identity rather than arrival narrative. In Ivan Ralston’s case, the useful reading is technical: a dining room shaped by its city’s weather, density, contradictions, ingredients, and encounters, with the metropolis treated as working material rather than décor.
The Making
A dual formation in music and hospitality can produce a useful tension in a kitchen: timing against repetition, variation against structure, listening against control. Ivan Ralston trained at Berklee College of Music and Escuela de Hostelería Hofmann, a pairing that helps explain the way his cooking is often discussed through rhythm, restraint, sequencing, and service discipline. The point is not biography as ornament; it is the transfer of compositional habits into restaurant work. High-discipline kitchens refine how decisions are made at the scale of gesture, sequence, and effect. Ralston worked as a brigade member at El Celler de Can Roca in Spain, then as a brigade member at Mugaritz in Spain, and later as a team collaborator at RyuGin in Tokyo, Japan. Those posts placed him inside systems where detail is structural, and where a dish is judged not only by contents but by movement, placement, timing, and aftertaste. A restaurant founded after that kind of formation has to choose whether to display its references or metabolize them. Today, Ivan is chef and owner; founder of Tuju (since 2014). The place carries music training, formal hospitality schooling, and experience in Spain and Japan as working disciplines rather than citation. There, rhythm becomes pacing, rigor becomes clarity, and outside experience is used to read his home base more closely.
The Work Today
Place-based cooking depends on whether location is treated as source or theme. In Ralston’s current role, the project is built from an urban field of encounters, materials, climates, and ideas. The work is not positioned as technique detached from territory, or as a cuisine imported into Brazil and adjusted afterward. The restaurant’s stated language makes that position explicit: “I often say that this is a true São Paulo restaurant. It’s not fusion cuisine, but rather a cuisine of encounters—the unique encounters that can only happen in São Paulo.” The distinction matters for cooks. The city is not used as backdrop or accent; it sets the operating conditions. Ingredients, meetings, climate, architecture, and method all enter the kitchen’s logic, shaping how time, seasonality, and exchange are handled. Research functions here as part of production thinking, not as a label added to finished plates. Ralston puts it plainly: “We had the opportunity to travel for a year, to truly understand the territory and the seasonal cycles based on the rainfall. Nothing is there by chance; everything serves a purpose.” The craft claim is in the order of attention: rainfall before menu, territory before technique, reason before form. The address is best read as an enterprise built from observation as much as invention. Its task is not only to represent its surroundings, but to work from inside their multiplicity through a cuisine of encounters. The craft depends on patience, research, and exacting execution gathered through Ralston’s formation and applied to a restaurant founded in 2014.
Accolades
Recognition in this case tracks a restaurant whose São Paulo identity has remained the through-line while the method tightened. Ivan's honors include Michelin Guide: Green Star for Tuju (2024), Michelin Guide: second star for Tuju (2018), Latin America's 50 Best Restaurants: Tuju ranked No. 45 (2017), Latin America's 50 Best Restaurants: Tuju joined the list (2016), and Michelin Guide: first star for Tuju (2015). Together with Tuju earning Three Michelin stars in São Paulo in 2026, the record points to sustained peer and guide attention around place-based work, research discipline, and a sharpening restaurant language.
Profile updated July 2026
FAQ
Asked of Ivan
What is Ivan Ralston's current position?
Ivan Ralston is chef and owner.
Where did Ivan Ralston train or study?
Ivan Ralston trained at Berklee College of Music and Escuela de Hostelería Hofmann.
What recognition has Ivan Ralston received?
Michelin Guide: Green Star for Tuju (2024).
