Piano Nobile

Ham, time, and the same estate

Honza Štěrba tests ham by time, not by impatience. As Executive Chef at Piano Nobile in Mcely, he works inside Chateau Mcely with a kitchen shaped by one long appointment. Honza Štěrba first cooked at the property as chef from 2006 to 2010, then took the Executive Chef post at Piano Nobile in 2010. The title changed; the house did not. That matters in a restaurant set within a chateau, where continuity can be felt in the pass before it is named on the plate.

Štěrba’s public account of the work is practical. He speaks about testing aging periods for ham, comparing results, and refining the profile the kitchen wants to serve. The point is not a flourish of preservation for its own sake. It is a discipline of holding, tasting, adjusting, and waiting again. At Piano Nobile, that patience sits beside classical French-style cooking, Mediterranean inflection, local sourcing, and a seasonal kitchen that draws from the estate, the surrounding forest, the Nine Flowers herbal tradition, and Cusumano family recipes. The inheritance here is not only aristocratic recipe memory; it is the daily pressure of making an old house cook in the present tense.

Aging as a kitchen decision

The ham program gives the clearest view of Štěrba’s method. He has described trials across six-month, nine-month, and twenty-month aging, a sequence that makes time part of the mise en place. Each interval asks a different question of salt, fat, texture, and service. The kitchen does not need to make that work visible in the dining room for it to shape the dish. The bench-side decisions have already happened.

Piano Nobile’s broader program follows the same habit of control. The restaurant offers tasting menu and à la carte formats, but the cooking is not built around choice as a performance. It rests on seasonal ingredients, local suppliers, chateau gardens, the smokehouse, and neighbouring farms, with fish from nearby lakes and sheep farm products part of the estate’s orbit. The wine program carries its own measure: more than 1,000 bottles and 260 different wines, including Bordeaux and an exclusive cuvée from Czech vintner Jiří Hort made for Chateau Mcely. That cellar gives the dining room range without asking the kitchen to shout.

The room on the noble floor

The room keeps its formality quietly. Chandeliers sit above high ceilings; decorative porcelain catches the eye without making the table feel secondary. Piano Nobile occupies the chateau’s noble floor, and the setting carries the old grammar of the house: symmetry, polish, restraint, a sense that service should move cleanly around conversation rather than over it.

During service, the pass has to answer to that room. Plates leave a kitchen working with French technique, local Bohemian memory, and the steadier tempo of an estate restaurant rather than an urban room built for turnover. The atmosphere is intimate and composed, helped by the quiet of the dining room and the scale of the restaurant. Nothing in the space asks for speed. That suits Štěrba’s kitchen, where a ham can pass through six-month, nine-month, and twenty-month trials before the final profile earns its place beside the porcelain of Piano Nobile.