Room by Le Kief

Da'an's Quiet Contender in Taiwan's Cocktail Conversation

Taipei's cocktail scene has matured in a way that few Asian cities outside Tokyo and Hong Kong have matched in the same period. Where early craft bar culture in Taiwan borrowed heavily from Western templates, a second wave of programs began building from local ingredients, Taiwanese sensibility, and a more deliberate relationship with the region's drinking traditions. Room by Le Kief, positioned on Heping East Road in Da'an District, belongs to that second wave. It is not the loudest bar in the city, and that is precisely the point.

Da'an is the neighbourhood where a specific kind of Taipei drinker converges: less interested in spectacle, more interested in what is actually in the glass. The district's low-rise streets and relative remove from the neon corridors of Xinyi give bars here a different register. Entering a room like this, the expectation is calibrated craft rather than performance, and the venue's footprint and format reflect that expectation.

Where Room by Le Kief Sits in the Taipei Bar Tier

Taipei has developed a peer set of internationally recognised cocktail programs that now competes seriously with other Asian bar cities. Room by Le Kief reached #19 on Asia's 50 Best Bars in 2021, having placed #27 in Asia and #46 globally in 2020. Those rankings position it at the upper tier of the Taiwan bar scene and within the broader Asia top-20, a bracket that includes programs from Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai.

That peer context matters when reading a bar's ambitions. Asia's top-20 ranking is not a volume metric; it reflects the sustained quality of a cocktail program as judged by a large-scale industry vote. For Room by Le Kief to hold that position means the program had sufficient consistency and originality to earn repeat recognition across consecutive years, not a single-cycle anomaly. Its 4.3 Google rating across 260 public reviews adds a different layer: the same quality signal holds with a broader, less specialised audience.

Within Taipei specifically, the bar operates in a competitive cohort. Alchemy, Bar Mood, Draft Land, and Club Boys Saloon each represent distinct approaches to craft cocktails in the city. Room by Le Kief's positioning in Da'an, rather than the denser bar districts, signals a deliberate separation from high-footfall tourism corridors and a preference for an audience that arrives with purpose.

Taiwan's Cocktail Culture and What It Produces

Understanding why a bar like Room by Le Kief resonates requires some context about Taiwan's drinking culture more broadly. Taiwan sits in a region where spirits culture is deep but differently oriented: rice-based spirits, kaoliang, fruit liqueurs, and a long tradition of tea consumption have all fed into how Taiwanese bartenders think about flavour, balance, and seasonal ingredients. The island's agricultural diversity, from high-mountain oolongs to tropical fruits at lower elevations, gives creative bar programs access to a pantry that programs in colder climates simply do not have.

The stronger cocktail programs in Taipei have learned to translate that local palette into internationally legible drinks without stripping out what makes them distinctly Taiwanese. That tension between local identity and international credibility defines the most interesting tier of the city's bar scene. A ranking in the Asia's 50 Best system is partly a signal that a bar has solved that translation problem well enough for a geographically diverse voter base to recognise it.

This cultural framing is particularly relevant for visitors arriving from outside Asia. Room by Le Kief is not a cocktail bar that mimics a London or New York program. What the awards record suggests is a bar that has developed a program grounded enough in its own context to earn external recognition on its own terms.

The Global Comparison Set

Placing Room by Le Kief's 2020 World's 50 Best ranking of #46 globally requires some sense of what that tier represents. The World's 50 Best Bars list covers programs across dozens of countries, and the 40s bracket typically contains bars that are well past emerging status: they have a defined identity, a recognisable body of work, and enough cross-border reputation to accumulate votes from an international electorate. Bars in that bracket tend to draw serious drinkers from outside their home city specifically to visit.

For comparison, Taiwanese bars that reach that level are rare, which means Room by Le Kief represented something of a signal moment for Taiwan's place in the global cocktail conversation, alongside whatever other programs were competing in the same cycle. Bars at a comparable international tier in other cities include Bar Leather Apron in Honolulu, Jewel of the South in New Orleans, Julep in Houston, and Kumiko in Chicago, each operating at the intersection of regional identity and international craft recognition.

Taiwan's Broader Bar Geography

Room by Le Kief is a Taipei entry point into a cocktail culture that extends beyond the capital. Taiwan's bar scene has developed meaningful programs in other cities worth knowing. Maltail in Kaohsiung operates in the south, where a different urban character shapes the bar's register. Moonrock in Tainan draws on that city's older, more historically layered identity. Vender in Taichung represents central Taiwan's contribution to the craft bar conversation. For a visitor building a more complete picture of Taiwanese cocktail culture, these bars across different cities provide context that a Taipei-only itinerary cannot.

Planning a Visit

Room by Le Kief sits at 68 Heping East Road Section 3, ground floor, in Taipei's Da'an District, within a walkable radius of the Liuzhangli MRT station area. The neighbourhood's character rewards walking before or after: bookshops, tea houses, and low-key dining options fill the surrounding streets without the density of tourist-facing areas. Given the bar's consistent awards recognition and relatively intimate format that the Da'an location implies, arriving with a reservation or early in the evening is the more reliable approach than expecting to walk in at peak hours on weekends. Phone and website details are not currently listed in the EP Club database, so booking through the bar's own social channels or via a hotel concierge familiar with the Taipei scene is the practical route. For a fuller map of what else the city offers across dining and drinking, our full Taipei guide covers the neighbourhood breakdown in more detail.