Derek Piva

Raised in Brazil in a farmer-and-rancher family, Derek Piva learned to cook from the ground up, literally. His earliest food memories are smoky and sunlit: open fires; backyard harvests; a respect for whole animals and the stubborn beauty of tough cuts. At sixteen, after dropping out of high school in New Zealand, he enrolled in culinary school and took the humblest jobs—porter, dishwasher, prep cook, absorbing the rhythms of kitchens before he ever led one. That appetite for work and flavor became his compass.

Piva’s career crosses hemispheres. In New Zealand, he polished a palate for clean, produce-driven cooking and learned the discipline that still anchors his food today. In Cuba, he helped build a restaurant from the bones out, writing menus around scarcity, training teams, and finding pleasure in simplicity. New York City brought refinement and speed; as Sous Chef at The Musket Room with Matt Lambert and later as Chef de Cuisine at The Clocktower, he cooked in rooms where precision is the price of admission, The Clocktower earned 1 Star in 2017 during his tenure. Los Angeles with TAO Group sharpened his sense of scale and hospitality theater working at the groups different concepts.

Today, as Executive Chef & Director of Restaurants at Tu Tu’ Tun Lodge on Oregon’s Rogue River, Piva’s cuisine is bold, seasonal, and flame-kissed. He cooks with the lodge’s gardens and the region’s wild abundance, grains, brassicas, coastal seafood, orchard fruit, favoring clarity over complication and heat that tastes like the woods it came from.The program’s momentum has been recognized with Wine Spectator’s Best of Award of Excellence (2025), Esquire’s Best New Hotels in the World (2025), and Travel + Leisure’s Readers’ 15 Favorite Resorts in the Western U.S. (2025), honors that speak to both the plate and the place.

What unites Piva’s journey from Brazil to New Zealand, Cuba, NYC, Los Angeles, and now the Pacific Northwest, is an insistence on cooking food that feels lived-in: ingredients treated with respect, focussing on flavor, and a sense of welcome that lingers. His cooking tastes like where it’s from: clear, elemental, and alive, with every dish built with restraint and intent: nothing extra, everything earned.