The 81 Best Places to Drink and Stay in Taiwan

The Mandarin Oriental, Taipei is a luxury hotel that arrived looking like it had been here since the 1930s, all deep Art Deco bones and none of the glass-tower minimalism most new Asian luxury hotels default to. The rooms are among the largest in the city, the spa is expansive, and between a Cantonese restaurant, an Italian, a French, a tea lounge, a cocktail bar, and a cake shop, leaving is genuinely optional. It holds a Michelin Key and a Forbes Four Star.

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 doorman in a crisp white uniform is still standing post when you arrive, which sets the tone for this grand Zhongshan luxury hotel. An Art Deco lobby with black marble floors and a soaring open atrium looks up toward seven restaurants stacked above it. There's also a rooftop pool, a spa, and a boutique shopping galleria woven through the base. Forbes Four Star. Business travelers fill the halls, but it never feels like a convention block.

A vertical garden climbs one wall, a light installation glows nearby, and the pool deck looks like it was airlifted from a beach resort. This 31-story hotel in Xinyi sits close enough to Taipei 101 to feel like a conversation with it. Rooms are quieter than the lobby suggests, though soaking tubs and the famously cosseting W bed soften any disappointment. The hotel holds a Forbes Four Star rating.

A gold-and-marble fountain anchors the white atrium lobby, which sets the tone for a hotel of 850 rooms that was never shy about its ambitions. This is a full-scale luxury property near the Taipei World Trade Centre, with nine restaurants, a heated outdoor pool with an underwater sound system, a fitness center, and an on-staff physician, because apparently a treadmill alone isn't enough. Rooms are spacious with city views, and the service has a way of knowing your name before the luggage cart does.

The rooftop pool on the 43rd floor looks straight at Taipei 101, which is either inspiring or humbling depending on your mood. This is a large, polished luxury hotel in the heart of the business district, with over four hundred rooms done in contemporary style with a Song Dynasty thread running through them. The spa, fitness center, and spread of restaurants and bars make it easy to stay put longer than any meeting agenda requires.

André Fu designed the interiors, and that name alone explains the particular combination of dazzling and quietly residential you feel inside. This luxury hotel occupies the upper floors of a Songshan high-rise, with 86 rooms and panoramic views of Taipei's skyline and hills. On-staff "Culturists" run daily programs from neighborhood walks to local tastings. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

Lamborghini and Ferrari showrooms line the Neihu streets outside, so the Taipei Marriott's decision to treat its nearly three-story lobby like a museum, hung with oversized works reflecting Taiwan's flora and fauna, fits the neighborhood's energy. Marble floors, art deco touches, and unobstructed views of the city's skyline make the scale feel deliberate rather than excessive. A Forbes Four Star hotel that leans hard into the tech-forward and polished.

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.

Toyo Ito's slightly curved tower rises above Songshan Cultural and Creative Park, and the hotel inside carries that same considered touch: traditional brick and stone, local art in the guest rooms, and walls of books in the Lobby Lounge that nod to Eslite's origins as a bookstore. It's a design-forward hotel where the literary angle is structural, not decorative, and the Park next door means the Xinyi district's bustle stays at arm's length.

Designers Neri & Hu turned a former apartment complex in Da'an into this boutique hotel, and the residential bones still show in the best way. Each evening Kimpton does its signature social hour, wine and light bites included, which removes the usual check-in awkwardness entirely. Tavernist, the in-house restaurant, has a Noma alum in the kitchen. The rooftop terrace looks out over the city, and the Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

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.

Bunk beds in a Hyatt property sounds like a prank, but EPISODE Daan makes it work, with rooms sized for families or friend groups and a social calendar most hotels wouldn't attempt. The Daan address keeps things low-key, and the lobby energy tips more neighborhood hangout than hushed lobby bar. Texas Roadhouse handles the grill, while The Social by Lay Low runs jazz, DJ, and vinyl nights for anyone not ready to call it a night.

Chandeliers hang over a marble-and-velvet lobby that signals exactly what this Da-An boutique hotel is about before you've found the elevator. The 60 rooms lean into the excess, with Bang & Olufsen audio, hardwood floors, and designer furniture throughout. Two restaurants, a bar, and a lounge round things out. Small by chain standards, which is rather the point.

A steel-mesh tower in Da'an designed by Ray Chen, Hotel Proverbs is the kind of hotel where a butler handles your shoeshines, floral arrangements, and currency exchange so you never have to think about anything inconvenient. Dark wood and copper-plated fittings set a deliberately indulgent tone throughout. The East District's high-end shopping and a nearby night market bracket the experience neatly, one for the day and one for after the TK Seafood & Steak dinner.

Okura is a Japanese luxury hotel group that doesn't chase global name recognition, which is probably why the product feels less like a brand exercise and more like a proper hotel. This one sits in Taipei's embassy district, surrounded by upscale dining and Japanese business connections. The look is contemporary-classic, the rooms are high-end, and the in-house restaurants cover Chinese, Japanese, and a café doing European pastries through a Japanese pastry lens.

Over 600 original works of art are woven into the structure of this sleek urban hotel in Xinyi, curated by a former symphony flutist, which tells you something about the ambitions at play here. Rooms run to silk velvet robes and Swedish specialty mattresses; suites add butler service and skyline views. A sixth-floor garden, a Mediterranean restaurant, spa, and heated outdoor pool round things out. The Michelin Guide has it among its selected hotels.

Dark wood, crisp white walls, and a gilded mirror or two define the look here, a luxury hotel in Taipei that describes its aesthetic as neo-classicism, though "enthusiastic Francophile" also covers it. Nearly 300 rooms come with private balconies, some with real skyline views. Downstairs, the dining options span Cantonese dim sum to a Moroccan-inspired bar, which is either confusing or charming depending on how you feel about commitment.

A hostel-hotel hybrid in Tainan's older quarters, U.I.J puts a Crosley turntable and a curated vinyl stack in the private rooms while the bunk beds come fitted with wide canvas berths. BBBooks, a 24-hour library lounge, and an open kitchen for guests who've been to the market next door round out the communal floor. The rooftop faces west. Old temples and narrow lanes are close enough to explore on foot and still make it back before the record ends.

Vinyl turntables come standard in every room at this boutique hotel, which should tell you something about the crowd it's after. Housed in a corner building that's been around forever in old Tainan, the renovation leaned into dark wood, antique copper, and terrazzo bathrooms rather than away from them. Upper-floor south-facing rooms look directly onto Chihkan Tower. History and a proper bed, in one package.

The exterior alone earns a second look: 520,000 handcrafted Japanese bricks wound into a spiral, with triangular windows stacked like dragon scales. Inside this Zhongshan District hotel, every guestroom pulls from Dazhi's neighborhood history, dragon boats, the Keelung River, riverside duck farms, rendered in custom rugs in electric blues and burnt oranges and oversized art panels above the beds. Suites add turquoise ottomans and mustard chairs, which is a commitment.

Views toward the Calligraphy Greenway anchor the rooms at this sleek upscale hotel in Taichung's West District, where the interiors borrow their textures and sculptural shapes from Taiwan's mountain landscapes. Five restaurants run the range from local Taiwanese rethinks to broadly international, so you never really have to leave. Spacious, light-filled rooms handle both long business stays and weekend escapes without breaking a sweat.

Murals of antique-style shop signs cover the bedroom walls, a nod to the commercial neighborhood outside, where a couple of night markets keep things lively after dark. This IHG boutique hotel sits beside Central Park in the heart of Kaohsiung, with the approachable, design-forward personality of the brand: a pillow menu, a pet-friendly policy, and two in-house spots if you'd rather not navigate the city immediately after landing.

A three-story wine tower anchors the lobby like a prop from a 1930s film set, and the rest of this Taichung hotel commits to that same theatrical register. Guestrooms pair scalloped navy-and-gold wallpaper with brass-framed partitions and copper soaking tubs. Downstairs, Lumen runs all-day Taiwanese-European dining; The Ailise Bar upstairs does cocktails in low-lit private rooms. It lands on the right side of the line between committed and overdone.

A Seventies "artistic" hotel gutted and rebuilt into something industrial-chic and genuinely strange, in the best sense. RedDot is a design hotel in central Taichung, packed with contemporary art, unusual furniture, and textures that fight each other just enough to stay interesting. Rooms pull back from the spectacle a little, but the Nespresso machines and Toto washlets suggest the team knows comfort matters too. The Michelin Guide has it among its selected hotels.

No two rooms share the same artwork, which is one way to keep a boutique hotel from feeling like a catalog. Brio sits neatly between Central Park and the Liuhe Night Market, so you can calibrate your evening accordingly. Rooms run to white linens, blue furnishings, and wood floors, and a VIP butler service is open to any guest who wants one. The complimentary dessert and ice cream bar is a shameless crowd-pleaser, and nobody seems to mind.

Glass lanterns hang from the ceilings of the guest rooms here, casting a warm glow over pale wood paneling and plush built-in sofas, which sets the tone for this downtown Kaohsiung luxury hotel. Rooms are calm and spacious, with wide writing desks, tea stations, and bathrooms that run to walk-in showers or freestanding tubs. Breakfast is a Taiwanese buffet with panoramic city views, and the two in-house restaurants cover sushi and Hong Kong-style dim sum between them.

Floor-to-ceiling glass frames the Tamsui River from most rooms, which is a better morning view than you'd expect from a hotel sitting at the edge of Ximending's busiest stretch. Dark wood paneling and Simmons mattresses inside, Byredo amenities in the bathroom, and minibars that don't charge you to open them. Temples, night markets, and the full Ximending chaos are seconds from the lobby door, though the river keeps things calmer than the streets suggest.

Perched in Kaohsiung's Asia New Bay Area waterfront development, this luxury hotel counts the Kaohsiung Music Center and Exhibition halls as its nearest neighbors, so guests in the elevator might be tech executives or touring pianists with equal likelihood. The 253 rooms and suites run to Byredo bath products and Japanese washlets, and the indoor pool is genuinely dramatic. Several Chinese, Japanese, and international restaurants mean you rarely need to leave.

The rooms are soundproofed, the blackout curtains are serious, and the whole monumental minimalism of the place seems designed to make you forget Kaohsiung exists outside it. This luxury hotel in the city's heart runs an open-air infinity pool, a sauna, and a gym alongside restaurants including a teppanyaki and kaiseki counter worth staying in for. Sleep here and expect to feel very deliberately cut off from everything.

Hot springs rise from a Central Mountain valley in Taiwan, and the Japanese Hoshinoya group built their first overseas property around them. It runs like a ryokan, with public baths and private in-room ones, multi-course kaiseki meals, and rooms that frame the surrounding green gorge as if it were part of the decor. A Michelin Key property, and one that takes the Japanese slow-stay concept seriously enough that booking requires a call rather than a click.

Seven hundred rooms anchored to a shopping mall in downtown Kaohsiung, the Marriott is built for volume and makes no apologies for it. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame Aozihdi Forest Park or the Love River from the upper floors, and the banquet hall seats 2,000, which tells you who the regulars are. Swisspa and indoor pools handle the recovery. Thirty minutes from the airport, fifteen from the high-speed rail, it runs like a machine that happens to have very comfortable beds.

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.

The pale blue facade shifts color as the sun drops, which is either atmospheric or a happy accident, and probably both. This design hotel in northern Kaohsiung leans into the city's harbor identity through teal velvet headboards and latticed wood panels without making it feel like a nautical theme park. Rooms are open and residential in feel. Ripple, the in-house French restaurant, is worth knowing about before you arrive.

The lobby ceiling at Grand HiLai Taipei climbs high enough to make you forget you're in a business hotel, which is probably the point. Steel, glass, and neon on the outside give way to marble, mirrors, and curved neo-Deco furnishings that actually invite sitting down. It's in Nangang, Taipei's quieter eastern flank, which suits the crowd here: polished, purposeful, equally comfortable filing expense reports or planning a hike into the hills.

The building stands out in a city where big-chain hotels tend to blend together, and the rooms follow suit: warm, modern, and kept blessedly simple. This Marriott-family hotel sits a ten-minute walk from Feng Jia Night Market, one of Taiwan's most chaotic and enjoyable street-food sprawls. A restaurant on site handles international meals when you're too tired to wander, and the mountains beyond the city center are easy to reach for anyone who plans ahead.

Large windows looking out over Yizai Park give the white-and-wood rooms a calm, almost spa-like quiet that Anping's busy canal district does not immediately suggest. This contemporary hotel puts the Eternal Golden Castle and Yuguang Island within easy reach on foot or by car. The Sky Observation Deck handles sunset drinks with sweeping city views, DEPOT covers local street food and Western plates, and there is a fitness center plus a games room for anyone traveling with children.

An LED ceiling at the bar shifts colors and panel sizes all evening, which is either art installation or very good lighting design, and honestly the line blurs. This Hsinchu hotel skews more apartment-with-taste than business traveler's stopover, with rooms finished in Sealy mattresses and Grown Alchemist products. The guest-only SOCIAL lounge runs coffee and snacks all day, then eases into Happy Hour without making a fuss about it.

Five rooms, five private geothermal baths, and a former wine cellar that still earns its keep. Villa 32 is a small modernist retreat in Beitou where hot-spring access comes built into the room, not offered as an add-on. Suites run from tatami-and-sliding-screen Japanese style to plush Western rooms, and the courtyard dining quietly suggests that whoever lived here before had very good taste. No guests under 16, which tells you most of what you need to know about the mood.

Pink ceilings and teal subway tile give the rooms more personality than the business-hotel category usually promises. Just Sleep Tainan Hushan is a mid-range hotel sitting right beside Ten Drum Sugar Cultural Creative Park and the Chimei Museum, with the High Speed Rail station close enough that getting in or out is painless. Charcoal walls and blonde wood keep things grounded while families and highway commuters share the lobby in comfortable coexistence.

A Song Dynasty painting served as the blueprint for this hill retreat in Xinpu, where a Taiwanese architect sent hundreds of artisans to work on hand-carved woodwork and winding courtyards. The layering of Jiangnan garden traditions, Fujian vernacular, and Baroque arcades reads less like a design mood board gone rogue and more like someone actually pulled it off. A hotel where the architecture is the argument.

About an hour outside Taipei, this ryokan-style resort sits inside the Wulai Mountains, where rooms have private hot spring baths and floor-to-ceiling windows aimed at the river. The public bathhouse runs to steam room, sauna, outdoor pool, and hydrotherapy pool, and mornings can start with Tai Chi if you'd like to feel very virtuous before lunch. A waterfall hike is also on offer, for those who need a reason to leave the bath.

Gothic stone arches and gilt-framed headboards in rural Taiwan is a committed bit, and Grasse Grace Manor commits completely. The rooms pull from 19th-century Paris and the French countryside, mixing wood-paneled rustic chic with ornate chandeliers. Restaurant Jasmine serves French cuisine beneath dramatic arched windows, while Cacti Bar does cocktails under a canopy of hanging ferns. A Michelin Selected Hotel, and one that keeps you slightly unsure which country you're in.

The geothermal spring beneath Sun Moon Lake was unknown until renovations here turned it up, and it now feeds the natural hot spring baths in most rooms. This lakeside resort sits above the northern shore, and those wide windows make the lake's shifting light and color hard to ignore from bed. It's been around forever, but feels more restorative than historic, grounded in local presence and sustainability practices that don't announce themselves too loudly.

Every room at this 93-room lakeside resort has a private balcony and a hot spring pool, and the architect clearly knew not to compete with Sun Moon Lake. The interiors are pared back to the point of restraint, which sounds like a compromise until the mist rolls across the water at dawn and you realize the whole room was designed to frame that exact moment.

An all-suite resort on the shore of Sun Moon Lake, built from Chinese cypress and designed by Australian architect Kerry Hill to match the drama of the water and mountains outside every window. Each suite comes with a full living room and a balcony pointed straight at the lake, and the spa's hot and cold pools share the same view. Sun Moon Lake is not somewhere you stumble onto, which makes the effort feel deliberate in a good way.

Six rooms inside the National Center for Traditional Arts, each named after an old Taiwanese land convention, make up this cluster-style hotel where the grounds and the museum are the same grounds. Architect Huang Sheng-yuan worked in red brick, terrazzo, and raw wood, leaving the bamboo groves and ponds intact. Guests wander freely through cultural exhibits and craft workshops after check-in, which is either a feature or a plot twist, depending on how you packed.

Rooms begin on the 16th floor at this IHG-flag hotel, which holds the distinction of being the tallest building in Chiayi City, a fact that becomes obvious the moment you spot it. Floor-to-ceiling windows pull in views that stretch toward Alishan's ridgelines. A rooftop bistro and a family leisure floor give it a resort-ish feel for a city property, and the regional design references land lightly enough that you notice them without feeling lectured.

A Victorian-inspired resort hotel that climbs 220 meters up Hualien's Coastal Mountain Range, with the Pacific on one side and the Central Range on the other. Rooms come with balconies as standard, and the Presidential Suite leans into the Buckingham Palace brief with William Morris fabrics and Wedgwood porcelain. The altitude earns its keep at sunrise, when the ocean lights up below and guests in dressing gowns briefly consider staying forever.

Rooms here face either the Pacific or the mountains behind Hualien, so picking a side is its own small drama. This is a resort in the real sense: the spa and the onsen-style spring-fed baths are reasons to stay in, not just amenities to photograph. The east coast keeps things from feeling like a city-hotel situation, even if the 252 rooms and the upscale dining options could pass for one on a grey Tuesday.