Álvaro Clavijo was born on July 20, 1985, in Bogotá, Colombia, according to a career profile published by El Tiempo. His father, an economist, died when Clavijo was four years old, and his mother, a helicopter pilot for the Colombian Red Cross, left her career to raise him and his sister, according to the same profile. Clavijo enrolled to study architecture at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá but abandoned the degree before finishing, a decision that set him on an unplanned path into professional kitchens, per El Tiempo. At 19, in 2004, he traveled to Paris intending to fund punk rock concert tours around Europe and took a dishwashing job at Sol y Luna, a restaurant in Saint-Germain-des-Prés owned by a family friend, where he found what he has described as unexpected peace in kitchen work, according to El Tiempo.

Clavijo formalized his training at the Hofmann School of Hospitality in Barcelona in 2005, before studying at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and working at L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in New York between 2007 and 2012, according to El Tiempo’s career timeline. He then spent two years at Thomas Keller’s Per Se and at Atera under Matthew Lightner in New York, followed by a 2014 stage at Noma in Copenhagen under René Redzepi, an apprenticeship path through some of the most demanding kitchens in the world, according to the same profile and a chef biography published by The Best Chef Awards. The training years were not easy: Clavijo has said he was once locked in a cold room and threatened by colleagues in France, and spent roughly four months assigned to repeatedly cleaning cow heads as a test of his resolve, according to an interview with Noticias Caracol’s Los Informantes program.

After a visa application to work in Russia was denied, Clavijo returned to Bogotá and opened El Chato in 2017 in the Quinta Camacho neighborhood before relocating a year later to Chapinero Alto, according to El Tiempo and Reporter Gourmet. He built the restaurant as a contemporary bistro rather than a formal fine-dining room, telling Food & Wine Gazette that “it was time to come home and execute my vision,” and structuring the menu around Colombian ingredients specifically so diners would return weekly rather than treat it as a once-a-year occasion. The restaurant struggled at first, facing local press indifference and financial strain, according to Food & Wine Gazette, before its first appearance on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list in 2020, when it ranked 80th globally and 7th in Latin America, a result that began building local credibility, per the same source.

El Chato’s global ranking climbed steadily after that first listing, moving to 83rd in 2021, 80th in 2022, 33rd in 2023 and 25th in 2024 on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, according to a career summary published by Frenchefs. On the regional list, the restaurant moved from third place in 2024 to first place in 2025 in Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants, while its global position settled at 54th that year, according to the World’s 50 Best organization’s own restaurant profile. Reaching number one in Latin America marked the first time a Colombian restaurant had topped the regional ranking, according to The City Paper Bogotá.

Judges singled out El Chato in 2025 for offering, in the words of 50 Best regional director Daniel Greve, a “coherent conceptual experience from the name and presentation through the final dish” built on authenticity rather than technical spectacle, according to Colombian business outlet Portafolio. The award drew heavily on hospitality, use of local products and a menu that evolves seasonally while keeping its identity intact, per the same report. By 2021, Clavijo was already ranking among Colombia’s five most-sought chefs for private dining requests from wealthy clients and companies seeking bespoke culinary experiences, according to La República.

Clavijo has worked as a paid instructor for Scoolinary, the online culinary education platform, teaching a masterclass on modern Colombian sauces and purées to a global audience of aspiring cooks, according to Scoolinary’s own instructor page. His profile as Latin America’s top-ranked chef has also made him a draw for branded dining events, including an American Express Foodies dinner that paired him with Chilean chef Carolina “China” Bazán at the Four Seasons Casa Medina in Bogotá, according to promotional material published on American Express Colombia’s own site.

Clavijo expanded beyond El Chato in late 2023 with the opening of Selma, a second Bogotá restaurant set in an early-twentieth-century house in Chapinero that reinterprets the French bistro format with Mediterranean and Middle Eastern influences, according to El Tiempo. In autumn 2021, he took his cooking abroad for the first time with Mitù, a Colombian restaurant in Milan opened in partnership with Iván Ramiro Córdoba, the former Colombian footballer and Inter Milan icon, where Clavijo serves as a consultant while Spanish chef José Narbona Rodríguez runs the kitchen day to day, according to Identità Golose.

No outlet has published details of Clavijo’s personal real estate holdings, and he does not appear to maintain a public property portfolio separate from his restaurants. His most substantial identifiable asset is El Chato itself, representing an investment of roughly 2 billion Colombian pesos, or approximately 500,000 dollars at recent exchange rates, according to the same La República profile that examined the restaurant’s operations. Beyond that flagship investment, Selma and his consulting stake in Mitù represent further business commitments rather than separate personal property, and no reliable public record ties any additional real estate to Clavijo individually.