Taipei
A working shortlist for the city whose cocktail scene quietly became one of Asia's most decorated. Six Asia 50 Best entries — a tea laboratory, a coffee-shop-by-day speakeasy, a cocktails-on-tap room, a pun-named bar, the bartender lineage, and the founding room of Taipei's bar revolution.
Da'an · $$$
Aki Wang's Tianjin Street bar since 2010 — the room that defined what serious Taipei cocktail-bar work looks like. Asia 50 Best regular; the Whisky Sour Reimagined (Kavalan Solist, longan syrup, plum bitters) is the standing dissection.
Da'an · $$$
Nick Wu's 2018 second-act bar on Anhe Road. World's 50 Best Best Bar in Asia accolades. A four-bartender lineage that traces through Indulge, Tokyo Speakeasy bars, and Singapore's Manhattan Bar — the current season is Taiwanese mountain ingredients.
Da'an · $$
The world's first all-cocktails-on-tap bar, opened 2018 on Anhe Road. Ten taps, two-month rotation, consistency-and-speed pitch. The Yuzu Highball is the bar's standing argument; cocktails at roughly half the slower-room Da'an price.
Da'an · $$$
Asia 50 Best speakeasy hidden behind Walking Coffee on Dunhua South Road. Same room, three modes — morning specialty coffee, late-afternoon transition, evening cocktails from 8pm by reservation only. Ounce Old Fashioned to open.
Zhongshan · $$$
Zhongshan laboratory-themed bar built around the working hypothesis that Taiwanese tea can carry a cocktail rather than just garnish it. Vacuum-distilled high-mountain oolong, the bar's High Mountain Highball, and a five-cocktail tasting menu at NT$2,400.
Zhongshan · $$$
Zhongshan cocktail bar whose drink names are puns — Mai Tai-pei, Beetle Juice, Long Time No Sze-chuan. The wordplay is the entry point; the cocktail-making behind it is technically excellent. Six current puns, refreshed quarterly.
Five of the six bars sit in Da'an, the central residential-and-cocktail district just south of Taipei Main Station; the sixth (Bar Pun) is in Zhongshan, ten minutes north. All six are within a fifteen-minute taxi ride of each other. Most operate from around 7pm to between 1am and 2am. Reservations are increasingly necessary at the top-tier rooms; the others take walk-ins early in the evening.
Two practical notes. Kavalan — the Taiwanese single-malt whisky distilled in Yilan since 2008 — appears on every serious back bar in the city and is the local pour to ask for first. The Taiwanese cocktail vocabulary leans on tea (high-mountain oolong, baozhong, dong ding, jasmine), fruit (longan, lychee, passion-fruit, plum), and a small handful of distinctive ingredients (betel leaf, sweet potato, taro). The bars below use all of them. Bring an open mind to the menus.
A working editorial ranking. Asia 50 Best entries throughout. Plan three for a single trip; all six for a long weekend.
Looking beyond Taipei? See our guide to the best hidden gem bars worldwide, or compare hidden gem bars city by city.