Wang Songtao, from China, with an economics degree, was a hairdresser; Luu Anh Tuan and Nguyen Thuy Phuong, both from Vietnam, held degrees from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, and were busy in fashion.
But all three friends were somewhat restless, musing their next moves. The answer, naturally, was to start an Asian restaurant, even though none had any professional training in gastronomy or hospitality.
“We started the whole thing as a hobby,” Songtao (referred to all as simply Tao) admits to the Budapest Business Journal. “Tuan was a fashion designer, had a lot of parties at his place. Late on, we’d be getting hungry, open the fridge and start cooking Chinese and Vietnamese food. I think that was the point when we wanted to introduce home food, the authentic taste, to our friends,” he continues.
To a sober outsider, this sounds like a recipe for disaster. It’s one thing for a group of students to knock out some late-night dishes for friends and entirely another to run a professional eatery, comply with regulations, manage the logistics and staff and serve a critical general public that can always vote with its feet.
A year or two later, Dániel Regős joined the team. A Hungarian with 17 years as the distributor for Bang & Olufsen in Budapest, Regős knew all about the required decibel levels for a plush dining room hi-fi system but little about ingredients for the best Thai desserts.
Fast forward to February 2025 when, despite their apparent lack of initial professional knowledge, not to mention the enormous setback resulting from COVID-19, the team quietly inaugurated their fifth restaurant, offering Japanese cuisine, in the basement of their main center on Arany János utca.
Sitting upstairs in the Opium (Vietnamese) outlet, Tao, later joined by Luu Anh Tuan (universally known simply as Tuan), revealed the secrets of their achievements to the BBJ.
“We’ve been preparing for quite a long time, 18 months, and now we wanted to open it without any pressure because we felt we still want to make it better. It’s open. We just haven’t advertised it. Before that, it was only open by appointment,” Tao says, speaking of the Japanese restaurant below. It doesn’t even have a name as yet.
Seven weeks later, as this paper went to press, the Japanese outlet remained un-christened, or perhaps that should be un-shintoed. Regős, perhaps leaning more towards Buddhist mysticism, told the BBJ, “The name will come when it’s time.”
But back to the interview in February: Tuan arrives and quickly reveals that efforts to co-run five restaurants mean he has long given up his fashion operation. However, he has yearned to manage a restaurant since childhood.
“I always wanted to open a restaurant; it was in my imagination, in my dream since I was a kid,” he reveals. Dreams are all well and good, but what about some apt culinary knowledge?
“The story is similar [to the fashion-party cook-ins],” he says, “From family gatherings, parents, big bunches of people. It was fun, lots of good food.”
But the five restaurants currently mean managing around 125 staff. It’s an enormous investment and operational undertaking. Did the team do any market research before starting?
“No. I did it by instinct. No need for research,” Tuan laughs out loud, “You feel from the air.” The man from Hanoi detects a sense of disbelief in his interviewer and continues.
“As I mentioned, art is my foundation; we are all art lovers. So, once you feel the art, design, trend, fashion, you feel the economy, politics, society in arts. That is the instinct, partly.”
Their first restaurant, primarily Vietnamese with some Chinese influence, was Sau, in Gozsdu udvar, District VII. With finance consisting only of family loans, it required a very hands-on commitment from the founding team.
“We separated the tasks. We worked a lot, physically. We slept there, sometimes, […] at the beginning,” Tau chips in. Indeed, team members even cooked in the early days, despite having no professional training, until a Vietnamese chef was sourced.
It’s a practice continued with all the openings. For Opium, created in a building left empty for years, Tuan cleaned each brick in the restaurant ceiling and then varnished them for effect. Regős, the Hungarian fourth member of the team, taught himself carpentry to make the chairs from redundant roof beams in the Opium and Qui outlets.
“It’s very important to feel the place from the beginning. It’s like giving birth […] A restaurant is more than just food, there has to be love in the cuisine, and the guests, they can feel that,” Tuan says.
The cuisine and central location have made Opium and its sister restaurants a haunt for film stars and the famous seeking repast in Budapest. But it doesn’t matter who comes through the door, according to co-owner Dániel Regős.
“It’s part of the swim, and the good part is, … ok, you’re going to write this, but we don’t care. We treat them like any average customer,” he declares, stressing that the business is not targeting any particular clientele.
“We’re open for anyone, and even if you just come in for a cup of tea, that’s fine. One time, we had Prime Minister Viktor Orbán sitting next door in Qui [the Thai restaurant], and at the next table, there were two guys from university eating pad thai. If it’s an ambassador, a famous star, still we treat them all as guests,” he says.
The in-house rule is to serve diners respectfully and not to impinge on their private space. That means no requests for selfies.
“We had Zendaya, the famous [American] actress, in the city for three months for filming, and I’d say almost every evening, over 80 times, she was here, with us, like a fixed part of her daily routine. She was far from home, and I think, apart from the food, we offered her some feeling of safety,” Regős recalls. This “protection” extends to external inquiries, including from the media.
“There were even some newspapers and TV channels calling us when they picked up we had some famous guests, asking what they had eaten and such. We don’t answer them. It’s not our territory, it’s a private matter,” he insists.
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of March 21, 2025.
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