Robin ChienTaipeiHome / Eat
19:0037 places I’d send a visiting executive in Taipei, sorted by the job the meal has to do. Each has a taxi card with the Chinese address.
Can’t decide?
Tell it what the dinner is for. It picks one of my places, with the taxi card ready.
The lazy Susan lands on one of my 37 places. Spin again if you don’t like the answer. That’s what it’s for.
12:30 · A bowl worth the queue
Taiwan’s national dish, in my own order. Everyone queues, executives included.
The guide
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Showing 37 places
A quiet room, a serious kitchen, and staff who know when to disappear.
Three stars nine years running, eleven private rooms, and a roast duck worth planning a trip around.
Ten private rooms for 6 to 50, and a Cantonese kitchen that just earned its star.
Classic Hong Kong-style Cantonese from a team of Hong Kong chefs, with rooms that combine for up to 46.
When the terms have to be settled at the table, this is still my first choice in Xinyi.
For the guest who says, ‘Take me somewhere I couldn’t find myself.’
About fifty years of Taiwanese seafood cooking in a small, plain room. This is what a star looks like without the theatre.
Taiwanese cooking built around tea, with window seats facing Taipei 101. An easy, interesting lunch between meetings.
Beef from cattle slaughtered in Tainan that morning, never frozen, sliced in front of you and swished in a clear bone broth. A Tainan tradition you can taste in Taipei.
Often called one of the hardest hot pot tables to book in Taipei, for its silky duck blood and tofu in a spicy broth.
Chef Su Pin-jui turns Taiwanese drinking snacks, street food, banquet dishes and even field-oven cooking into a seasonal tasting menu. Wood, rusted iron and tatami, with furniture and tableware by local designers.
Taiwan’s national dish, ranked. One to five is my personal order.
Beef noodles in a room with chandeliers and red wine. The broth simmers for hours with beef bones, short ribs and several kinds of tomato, and the noodles come in three widths.
Around since 1949, and famous for wide, chewy hand-made noodles in a red-braised broth with Chinese herbs. A basement food court, and one of the most honest bowls in the city.
A chef from Fukuoka who used to run a ramen shop applies ramen technique to Taiwan’s beef noodles. A golden broth with kombu and sea salt, and very tender shank. One dish, done properly.
A small shop that took gold for red-braised beef noodles at the 2023 Taipei International Beef Noodle Festival. You choose the noodle width and how firm you want it.
Started as a street stall in 1963 and still one of the best-known bowls in the city. The Sichuan-style red braise is the benchmark.
Open until 3 a.m. every night. The broth is beef bones and Chinese herbs, with no chili bean paste, so it tastes like nobody else’s.
Grills, skewers and hot pots. Loud enough to relax, good enough to remember.
Staff grill everything at the table while the city lights come on outside. You get to talk instead of cook.
A5 wagyu grilled for you at curtained tables, with private rooms when the team is bigger.
The 30 cm thick-cut beef tongue is the reason to come. Each table has its own grill and plenty of room.
A lively East District izakaya, open since 2017, with generous plates and modest prices.
Sashimi and charcoal skewers until late, with semi-private rooms for three to five.
The name is Mandarin for ‘oh my god’, and the private rooms make it the easy answer for a team of eight.
A long-running pasta room for the guest who needs a break from Asian food after a week on the road.
It’s 1 a.m., your body thinks it’s lunchtime, and you want something hot.
A Japanese-run shop that cooks whole chickens overnight into a rich, creamy broth, and stays open until 3 a.m.
Opens at dinner and serves until the small hours. Red-braised beef noodles from a broth simmered for a day, and little pots of chicken soup made from old hen, which is exactly what a jet-lagged body wants at 2 a.m.
Open all night for more than fifty years. When your body clock says lunch at 4 a.m., this is one of the few places in the city serving a proper meal.
Plain rice congee with more than twenty home-style dishes made fresh each day, served until 5 a.m. The kind of meal a Taiwanese family eats at home.
Started as a roadside stall and still feeds Zhongshan’s night owls. Savory congee in chicken-bone broth, topped with fried shallots.
A free afternoon and a car. Seafood where the boats come in.
No menu. You point at the day’s catch in the tanks and they cook it. Worth the train ride.
Local crab weighed in front of you, then steamed or stir-fried, at a five-table harbour shack.
A harbour seafood house at Bitou, where the northeast coast gets wild. Pick from the tanks, then walk the Bitou Cape trail before or after lunch.
New Taipei favourites. Fewer visitors, honest prices, worth the MRT ride.
Hand-made pasta with Taiwanese ingredients, in a room with a wine-bar feel and a cocktail counter.
Skewers dipped in a house sauce and slow-grilled over charcoal, a minute from the station, until 2 a.m.
The old Taiwanese way: onions and meat seared in the stone pot before the broth goes in.
A lamb-soup shop that has been at it for more than a decade. The dang-gui broth simmers all day, and it is the bowl Taiwanese people reach for when the weather turns.
A loud, busy rè chǎo house built for group dinners: plates arrive fast, the beer is cold, and nobody minds the noise.
Cheap, lively skewers. You pick the raw ingredients at the door, and every table has green Sichuan pepper, chili and pepper powders to season your own.
Each clay pot of congee is cooked to order from raw rice, so the seafood flavour goes all the way through. The red crab congee is the reason to come.
For bars and live jazz, see After dark.
Checked against public sources on 9 October 2026. Restaurants change, so call ahead for anything that matters. Nobody paid to be on this list.