Food of love: Les Roches alumni launch restaurant and new life together

More than 20 years after bonding at Les Roches over home-cooked food, alumni Polly Liao and Andy Lin found love and founded a restaurant together in their native Taiwan.

Call it fate. Call it destiny. Sometimes things are just meant to be. That’s certainly how it seems with Polly Liao and Andy Lin who, despite going their separate ways after graduation in 2001, have ended up married and running a restaurant together.

Andy’s Bistro is a unique eatery based in Siluo, Taiwan – Polly’s home town – and offers diners the opportunity to enjoy high-quality cuisine from Italy, India, New Orleans and France that’s a real rarity in the country.

The couple opened their joint venture after Andy sold the restaurant he was running in the capital Taipei and moved to the small town of Siluo in the country so he and Polly could get together. And while this course of action seems to have been written in the stars, there was little indication things would turn out this way when the pair parted company after their Les Roches experience.

Separate ways

“Andy was really popular with the Taiwanese students on campus because he used to cook for us all,” says Polly. “We grew quite close, but after our time in Crans-Montana, I returned to Taipei where I worked in the housekeeping department for Shangri-La,” says Polly, who graduated from the Diploma in Hotel Management program in 2001. “A year later, I went to the UK to study a Master’s in human resources management, then came back to Taiwan to work in HR. But the corporate life didn’t suit me and I returned to my home town in 2009 to start my own teaching business.”

Andy also went back to Taipei after completing his diploma in 1999, but having worked for around a year, he decided he still had much more to learn, so came back to Les Roches to complete his BBA from 2000 to 2001.

“I stayed in Switzerland after graduation, carrying out my internship in the restaurant of an international school in Geneva and even being recommended to work in a Michelin-starred restaurant in the city,” says Andy. “But due to family issues, I had to move back to Taiwan. That’s when I started my hotel industry career in earnest as a housekeeping coordinator.”

Despite pursuing diverging post-graduate paths that would sometimes see them thousands of miles apart, the two did stay in touch. But even when they were both in Taipei, they did not meet often.

Staying in touch

So with Polly leaving the Taiwanese capital and Andy steadily building a career in hospitality there and already married to someone else, the chances of them ending up together at that time seemed remote.

“I moved back to start a new life,” says Polly. “We weren’t really in contact with each other that much, only meeting during a reunion. We were still friends and occasionally got in touch via Messenger, but I was concentrating on building up my business and Andy was really busy too.”

Andy was indeed fully occupied. Having transferred from housekeeping to the sales and marketing department, he had worked his way up to Director of Sales after 15 years. Following that, he switched to pre-opening roles in Taiwan, the first one having been at the Holiday Inn. He then moved to the Taipei City Hotel, where he would eventually become hotel manager.

“But around four years ago, my mom passed us away and I decided to quit the hotel because I had to take care of my father,” he says. “I still needed to work, though, so I chose my favorite element of hospitality: cooking. And I started running my own restaurant in Taipei.”

Getting together

It was not until Andy had opened his second restaurant in Taipei that he and Polly started contacting each other more regularly.

“Every year, I give myself two weeks of vacation and in 2022 – still during the pandemic – I couldn’t go abroad,” says Polly. “So I went to Taipei for two weeks and I thought it was time I visited Andy in his new restaurant. After that, we started chatting a lot more online.

“It reminded me a lot of when we were at Les Roches, where we used to chat about anything, no matter whether it was good or bad. We always felt comfortable sharing our feelings with each other. And after a while, because we were both single, I shared that I thought maybe it was time for us to get together.”

Things moved quite quickly after that. Andy sold his restaurant and apartment in Taipei, bought the building that now houses Andy’s Bistro, moved to Siluo and got married to Polly. And since then, the couple have continued to build up their businesses and enjoy their new lives together.

Practical applications

“It’s definitely been a challenge,” says Polly. “When I started, I was just teaching English to high school students. Now I have four full classes, with other team members teaching different subjects, so as you can imagine, I’m always really busy.

“The same is true for Andy, who having wrapped up the business in Taipei had to start our new restaurant from scratch. But we both recognise the importance of supporting each other and were delighted when we finally opened Andy’s Bistro in August 2024.”

Fortunately, Polly and Andy have both been able to deploy many of the things they learned at Les Roches to help them in their ventures.

“I always enjoyed the practical side of the program,” says Polly. “Although the academic side was interesting, I much prefer learning through working rather than sitting in the classroom and the practical element taught us skills we could genuinely apply in the workplace.

“Now I’m no longer in the hospitality industry, I don’t necessarily use any of those skills, but I share my experiences at Les Roches with my students, who are really interested in hearing about studying abroad and the many different people and cultures you encounter at international schools.”

As someone who had never worked before arriving at Les Roches, Andy also enjoyed the practical side of his studies.

“That was really helpful for me,” he says. “I had never worked in a hotel or restaurant before, so the practical element taught me a lot. What also helped was volunteering to do the service at a wedding held at the school during the first three weeks. Although incredibly tiring, it was fun and showed me the standards expected at that level.”

Having applied that learning throughout his career, he is now putting them to great use in the couple’s fledgling business.

“It’s funny,” says Polly. “I remember at Les Roches, they said we have the cleanest kitchen in the world. And every time we worked in the kitchen, we had to clean up everything afterwards and make it shiny. That’s obviously something that stayed with Andy ever since.”