“It all starts with good dough,” Pavel says. “I’ve been making my own sourdough since Covid, when everyone was baking homemade bread. Some people made bread, I made pizza.” On his cargo e-bike, he travels to weddings and small family or corporate events, where he literally prepares his genius pizza behind the handlebars. “I use only local Czech flour – about 20% of it stone-ground – which gives the dough its distinctive flavour,” he explains.
The other half of his success lies in the oven. Pavel carries a pizza oven with a heavy chamotte stone that keeps a steady temperature of over 500°C. It takes about 45 minutes to reach full heat, so he just needs to arrive an hour before the event. “Once the oven’s hot, the pizza is ready in two minutes, and it’s the real deal,” he says.
Pavel has lived in Canada, London, and Berlin, but has now called Prague home for ten years. Together with a small team of like-minded pizza lovers, he’s opening a new brick-and-mortar pizzeria in Prague. “The menu will be similar to what I make on the bike – no more than four types, but all top-notch. No generic stuff,” he says.
The name PizzaBici came to him instantly: it says everything. He loves both pizza and cycling. Pavel is a fan of classic brands like Campagnolo and Colnago, and his hero is Eddy Merckx. If he could choose one event to ride, it would be L’Eroica, the nostalgic race across the white gravel roads of Tuscany’s Strade Bianche. “Cycling and the aesthetics of the old days are my big passion,” he says. “So baking pizza on a cargo bike is just a logical way to combine what I love.”
He opens the cargo box to show what he needs to run his mobile pizzeria: dough for 50 to 60 pizzas, a bucket of his homemade tomato base, all the ingredients, the oven, and a ten-kilo gas tank.
He usually makes three types: a spicy pizza with ventricina salami and capers, the classic Margherita, and a third one that changes depending on the occasion. “Right now, I’ve got a new Korean teammate, so we came up with a pizza topped with kimchi jam and homemade sausage on a white base,” he says, adding that he also loves anchovies and olives or a lighter version with thinly sliced zucchini and lemon.
“Prague is hilly and some climbs feel like mountain stages,” Pavel laughs, “but the Bosch Cargo Line motor makes it easy. It’s built for heavy-duty bikes and has enough power and torque for smooth starts, even when fully loaded.” He rides about 220 kilometres a week and usually prefers car lanes over narrow bike paths. Drivers, he says, are mostly considerate – and curious. “I think it’s the heaviest single-track cargo bike you can get, and you need a bit of confidence to ride it,” he smiles.
