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The 13 Best Places to Drink and Do in Taipei

The best places to drink and do in Taipei, according to the experts: Forbes Travel Guide, The 50, and Difford's Guide have all weighed in, and their honors are what rank this list. The Spa at Mandarin Oriental, Taipei comes out on top.

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Wellspring by Silks Beitou and Bar Mood hold the next two places. Difford's Guide and The 50 show up on more of this list than any other guide.

Drink + Do, change section

Departments

A department belongs to one section, so choosing one narrows the list to it.

  • All
  • Cocktail Bars
  • Speakeasies
  • Tiki Bars
  • Wine Bars
  • Beer Bars
  • Dive Bars
  • Pubs
  • Gastropubs
  • Taverns
  • Izakayas
  • Outdoors
  • Shopping
  • Activities
  • Museums
  • Amusement Parks
  • Venues
  • Landmarks
  • Clubs
  • Spas
  1. The awards


  2. The awards


  3. Rank 3. Bar Mood

    Creative Cocktail Bar

    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.



  4. Rank 3. The Public House

    British Cocktail Bar



  5. 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.



  6. 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.


  7. Rank 10. Bar Otani

    Japanese Cocktail Bar

    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.

    The awards


  8. Rank 10. Lab

    Cocktail Bar

    The awards


  9. The awards


  10. The awards


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Eat Score

The score comes from the awards it's won, weighted by who gave them: a Michelin star outweighs a listicle. When you sort by what's nearby, distance changes the order, never the score.

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    Drink Score

    The score comes from the awards it's won, weighted by who gave them: a Michelin star outweighs a listicle. When you sort by what's nearby, distance changes the order, never the score.

      How we score →

      Stay Score

      Four fifths of the score is the awards it's won, weighted by who gave them: a Michelin Key outweighs a listicle. The last fifth is where it is: the ranked places to eat and things to do around it, and how safe the country is. When you sort by what's nearby, distance from you changes the order, never the score.

        How we score →

        Do Score

        The score comes from the awards it's won, weighted by who gave them: a Michelin star outweighs a listicle. When you sort by what's nearby, distance changes the order, never the score.

          How we score →

          Best Place Score

          The Best Place Score rates the area around a point, not any one place. The places are 60% of it: the best of what's within reach, weighed by distance. The setting is the other 40%: how life goes in that country (how people rate their own lives, how long and how well they live, how safe they are) and what it's like right there (the air, and the weather). If the score looks low, we probably haven't found enough critics out here yet.