The 25 Best Places to Drink and Do in Taiwan

A coin slot in a vending machine is the door, which tells you most of what you need to know about this cocktail bar before you've even sat down. Inside, more vending machines dispense bottled cocktails and beer, while the menu groups drinks by their main ingredients rather than names. A miniature Singapore Sling greets every guest on arrival, a nod to co-founder Summer Chen's years behind the stick in Singapore. Ranked on Asia's 50 Best Bars and the World's 50 Best Bars lists.

The interior looks like a Taiwanese tea house, all dark wood and trailing greenery, until you read the cocktail list and realize blue cheese has somehow ended up in a tequila drink. This intimate cocktail bar in Tainan keeps its menu short and its combinations strange, in the best way. It landed on Asia's 50 Best Bars, which tells you the ambition behind that unassuming alley entrance is not accidental.

The name translates to "nothingness," which feels like a deliberate setup for cocktails that are anything but. This is a cocktail bar from one of Taiwan's more technically obsessive bartenders, whose previous spot ran on Asia's 50 Best Bars lists for years before he closed it to start over. The drinks lean on serious experimentation, the kind where balance is the point, not the novelty. Asia's 50 Best Bars has it on their extended list.

The cocktail menu arrives illustrated like a small art book, which tells you a fair amount about where Bar Mood sits on the seriousness scale. This is a cocktail bar in Da'an with a considered focus on Taiwanese and Japanese whisky and creative original drinks. Small plates are available if you need something to slow things down. It has appeared on Asia's 50 Best Bars, which draws the kind of crowd that has opinions about pandan syrup.

The herb garden out front is your only clue that a serious cocktail bar is tucked into this quiet residential lane in Da'an. Inside, a purple-lit bar anchors a room where the team works with hand-picked native teas, turning them into house-made liqueurs that end up in most of what you'll drink. A Discovery selection from the 50 Best program. Go slowly; these are built to be considered.

Black walls and no music mean the only sounds in this cocktail bar are ice cracking in a shaker and the low hum of a freezer, which turns out to be the right soundtrack. Tucked inside an old office building off Zhongshan North Road, it runs on the Japanese model where the bartender reads your mood and builds something around it. Small, dark, and unhurried, it suits lone drinkers best.

Every cocktail here comes out of a tap, which either sounds like a gimmick or a revelation depending on how you feel about the format. Draft Land is a cocktail bar built around that single idea: a rotating lineup of house-made drinks served on draft, so you can taste before committing. The Drinks Lab collective runs outposts across Asia, and this Taipei location has the energy of a place that knows it's onto something without needing to announce it.

Behind wooden doors on Guangfu South Road, a tea room gives way to a hidden cocktail bar where Taiwan's teas anchor everything on the menu, fermented, carbonated, or distilled into something you wouldn't expect. The drinks pull from producers around the island and borrow loosely from the world of wine. It earned a spot on The 50 Discovery list, which about sums up the vibe: a little secret, a little serious.

Vintage vinyl on the turntable, warm light, and cocktails made with fermented pineapple and eucalyptus: Voice-Over is a carefully considered cocktail bar in a former clinic that itself took over a much older house, which gives the place a pleasantly layered sense of calm. The silent-film inspiration runs through every detail without ever feeling like a theme bar. A 50 Discovery from Asia's 50 Best.