Ivan Ralston

Ivan Ralston is chef and owner and founder of Tuju. His work is shaped by a dual formation in music and hospitality, which informs the way his cooking is often discussed through rhythm, restraint, sequencing, and service discipline. He trained at Berklee College of Music and Escuela de Hostelería Hofmann, a pairing that helps explain the precision and structure associated with his restaurant practice. 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 roles placed him inside kitchens where detail is structural and where a dish is judged not only by contents but by movement, placement, timing, and aftertaste. His formation brought together musical timing and high-discipline hospitality, and that background carries into the way his restaurant work is read. Tuju, founded in 2014, is built from place, discipline, and restaurant identity. The project carries his music training, formal hospitality schooling, and experience in Spain and Japan as working disciplines rather than citation.

In his role, rhythm becomes pacing, rigor becomes clarity, and outside experience is used to read the restaurant’s home base more closely. The work is not presented as technique detached from territory, or as a cuisine imported and adjusted afterward. Instead, the restaurant is described as a true São Paulo restaurant, not fusion cuisine, but a cuisine of encounters. The city is treated not as backdrop or accent, but as the condition that shapes the work.

Ingredients, meetings, climate, architecture, and method all enter the kitchen’s logic, shaping how time, seasonality, and exchange are handled. Research functions as part of production thinking rather than as a label added to finished plates. Ralston has said that the team had the opportunity to travel for a year to understand the territory and the seasonal cycles based on rainfall, and that nothing is there by chance.

In that approach, rainfall comes before menu, territory before technique, and reason before form. The address is built from observation as much as invention, with the task of working from inside the city’s multiplicity through a cuisine of encounters. Recognition has followed Tuju’s São Paulo identity and its increasingly disciplined method. The restaurant received a Michelin Guide first star for Tuju in 2015, joined Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2016, was ranked No. 45 on Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2017, received a Michelin Guide second star for Tuju in 2018, and earned a Michelin Guide Green Star for Tuju in 2024.

Tuju also earned Three Michelin stars. Together, these honors point to sustained attention around place-based work, research, and a sharpening restaurant language.