Taiwan

Extraction before display

Berg Wu manages roast clarity as Coffee Roaster at Taiwan in Budapest, carrying a Taipei bench habit into a restaurant room far from his own roastery. Berg Wu built his practice alongside study at NTU, then founded Simple Kaffa in Taipei in 2011, shaping a shop around distinctive flavor selection, careful roasting, and service for drinkers who listen closely to aroma and cup structure. His formal competition record is the World Barista Champion title in 2016, but the more useful frame is the daily one: extraction control, ultra-clean roasting techniques, and espresso preparation managed with the discipline of a competitor who still has to serve a counter. At Taiwan, his role gives the coffee program a maker’s spine rather than a generic after-dinner function. The cup is treated as a station, not an accessory. Roast, grind, temperature, portafilter handling, and presentation all sit inside the same method, with clarity valued over weight.

A bar grammar brought from Taipei

Aki Wang works from a different bench, but his formation also began in repetition. He entered hospitality at 16, working a coffee bar to help support his family, then moved behind the cocktail counter at Wonder Bar. Since 2001 he has founded Indulge Life Hospitality Group, and since 2009 he has been bartender, owner and head bartender at Indulge Experimental Bistro in Taipei, where Chinese cocktails became the center of a clear house language. In 2015 he founded International Bartender’s Week Taiwan, naming its core spirit as “Education, Hospitality and Sustainability.” That sentence matters here because it reads like a service brief, not a flourish. At Taiwan in Budapest, Wang’s presence points the bar away from spectacle and toward structure: timing, balance, service pressure, and a drink vocabulary that can carry Chinese references without turning them into decoration. His signatures, including Savor of Wild Forage and Tung Ting, sit within that same discipline, composed around restraint, texture, and place.

The program held at the counter

The restaurant does not state how Wu and Wang divide their time in the room, so the work is best read through the practices they bring to the station. Wu’s known methods include Smoky Southern Taiwan, a cold portafilter technique, and a portafilter ice bath, all pointing toward espresso handled as a controlled sequence rather than a push-button result. Wang’s bar work has been built through service under pressure, first at a coffee counter, then through cocktail rooms and an industry platform. Together, they give Taiwan a beverage identity with two distinct hands: one trained on roast clarity and extraction, the other on Chinese cocktails and hospitality as a discipline. The room becomes legible through those choices. Coffee has a bench-side logic. The bar has a grammar. Neither needs noise to register.

Where the craft settles

What matters at this address is the transfer of method from Taipei into Budapest, not a claim of sameness between the two cities. Wu’s roastery practice and Wang’s bar practice arrive with different tools, yet both depend on repeatable gestures: a portafilter cooled before extraction, a drink built to carry Tung Ting without losing line, a counter kept steady through service. The next movement here is not announced through a public handover or a dated release. It remains in the working details of Taiwan: Berg Wu’s portafilter ice bath and Aki Wang’s Tung Ting.