How a Czech opened Taiwan's only Czech pub and adapted goulash

Karel Piha moved to Taiwan for a girlfriend, stayed for 13 years, and opened Taipei's only Czech pub, called Divadlo. On the side, he runs the creative studio Be Lucky, which works with major local brands like Asus, ViewSonic and BenQ, and whose income lets him run the restaurant as a “side project.”

Piha ended up in Taiwan thanks to a Taiwanese girlfriend he met while studying visual communication in Birmingham, UK. There he also worked part-time at a Scottish seafood restaurant and, in his words, first developed a taste for hospitality. The couple planned to spend six months in Asia, but the relationship ended — and Piha stayed on the island anyway, the one Portuguese sailors once nicknamed Formosa.

He started out at an advertising agency, but corporate routine quickly bored him, and he launched his own creative studio. The margins in that business, he admits, aren't spectacular, but they provide a financial cushion for the restaurant, which doesn't lose money on its own but couldn't support him by itself either.

Piha opened the restaurant in 2018 and built the menu literally from a cookbook, through trial and error: because of Taiwan's tropical humidity and climate, traditional Czech recipes behave differently and the flavors change. He had to develop a detailed technical manual — with exact amounts of salt, stirring frequency and the technique for shaping dumplings — that student part-timers now cook by.

Ferdinand beer is brought in in disposable twenty-liter plastic kegs, since returning containers to the brewery wouldn't be economical. Wine is supplied by the family winery Ludwig, and the Czech brand Kofola, the restaurateur says, has long had a warm relationship with him — the company of entrepreneur Jannis Samaras patriotically supports promoting Czech culture abroad even without much profit for itself.

Some ingredients are hard to find on the island — fresh celery, root parsley, or cottage cheese, which is practically unknown to locals. Sweet fruit dumplings are absent from the menu entirely — Taiwanese don't see sweet dishes as a main course. And classic dumplings served as a side are often mistaken for stuffed dumplings and eaten by hand rather than with cutlery.

Ninety percent of the restaurant's guests — the place has moved three times over its history — are young Taiwanese, who especially love the goulash, potato pancakes and beef tartare. The older generation isn't fond of Western cuisine, put off by beef on the menu and cutlery instead of chopsticks. Local politicians have shown up among the guests too: during the pandemic, when the whole world was in lockdown and Taiwan was nearly isolated, Czech Senate speaker Miloš Vystrčil visited with a delegation to try Czech draft beer — at the time, Piha's place was, by his own account, nearly the only open Czech restaurant in the world.