It’s six o’clock on a Friday. The regular crowd shuffles into VG Café Taipei, located in a nook on Fuxing South Road. They are greeted by light music, red brick walls, and wooden upholstery imported from Denmark. The style is simplistic and comforting. It’s time to enjoy a little wine, some salad, and steaks with friends at the conclusion of a long workday. This is a slice of life in dining pubs, which have gained a considerable following in the last couple of years.

VG Café used to be a gallery. Now it’s one of the most talked-about dining pubs in Taipei. Nearby on Dongfeng Street, there are seven or eight other dining pubs within a range of two hundred meters. They serve all sorts of libations, from Japanese sake to cocktails to fine wine. Tipsy patrons linger about chatting among themselves.

The dining pub wave has invaded even department stores. Inside Shin Kong Mitsukoshi’s Taipei Hsinyi Place A9, a ritzy mall of luxury brands such as Burberry and Coach, around ten dining pubs have set up shop.

Apparently, Shin Kong Mitsukoshi found there were too many night clubs but not enough places to savor alcohol in Xinyi District. So they invited Steven Lin (林一峰), a connoisseur who’s studied whiskies for over three decades, to open the pub “Backyard Jr.” (小後苑) inside A9.

Unlike conventional pubs, Backyard Jr. opens at eleven in the morning to accommodate the department store’s normal working hours. The staff invented new cuisines which go well with whisky to serve at lunch time or during afternoon tea.

“We were a bit worried at first. Removing very popular family restaurants and replacing them with dining pubs meant we needed to nurture and reeducate the market. We fully expected a short-term dip in our revenue and number of customers. We were astonished at the nearly seamless transition,” Wendy Tsao (曹美虹), store manager of Shin Kong Mitsukoshi’s Xinyi Place, says with surprise.

The introduction of dining pubs attracted European and American customers who are visiting Xinyi on business to frequent A9. In the past, these travelers mostly hung out in five-star hotel bars. Now it’s a common sight to see them prowling the Japanese department store.

Backyard Jr. is located inside a department store. It offers a variety of cuisines and is more family-friendly than your average whisky bar. (Photo by Chien-Tong Wang/CW)

After the Café Craze, Dining Pubs are Peaking

Dining pubs are by no means new in Taiwan. But they’ve become massively popular in the past five years.

Ken Chen (程開佑), Co-founder of the smart catering technology company iCHEF, says they conducted a customer survey of 4,500 restaurants in the first half of 2018. They found that dining pubs enjoyed a year-over-year growth percentage of 15.5% in terms of customer number, and 15.7% in terms of revenue. Both numbers were the highest out of fifteen different categories of restaurants.

On the other hand, the formerly fashionable coffee shops have begun to lose steam. Their growth percentage of revenue was only 0.2%, and their number of customers was declining.

Why the shift from cafés to dining pubs? According to Chen, it’s because dining pubs are uniquely suited to satisfy a new type of demand in the catering market.

Cafés came into fashion a decade ago because the younger generation wanted to escape from the reality of the global financial crisis and construct a comfort zone for themselves.

Ten years later, these coffee shop hipsters have grown up to become 25- to 40-year-old office workers. Wage growth has stagnated, and they can’t afford to buy a house of their own. What extra cash they have is spent on fine dining and lavish lifestyles. A dining pub offers alcohol, food, and a comfortable atmosphere. Naturally they are peaking in popularity.

When customers want to enjoy fine western cuisine with friends, a fancy restaurant in the price range of two to three thousand Taiwan dollars is too pricey, but a 200- or 300-dollar pasta and risotto eatery is too cheap. Dining pubs offer menus of around a thousand dollars per meal, so the price range is right in the sweet spot.

What’s more, dining pubs offer casual dining in a relaxed setting, unlike etiquette-obsessed high-end restaurants or rowdy bars and night clubs. “Matching liquor with food slows down the pace of the meal and makes it more enjoyable. It also alters and enriches the flavor. Nowadays, people appreciate the joy of wining and dining more,” says food and travel writer Yilan Yeh (葉怡蘭).

Michelin Chefs Get in On the Action

In addition, entrepreneurs are attracted to dining pubs because the barrier to entry is lower than opening a classy diner. High-end restaurants are literally made of money. Everything—from interior design to silverware, from ingredients to waiters to bartenders—is an expense. Sometimes a chef specializes in making only one dish, and you need to hire a dozen chefs just to run one restaurant.

According to Yeh, more and more classically trained chefs opt not to limit themselves with the formalities of fine dining. Instead, they choose to explore their creativity by going to work in less restricting and more approachable dining pubs. You may call it casual dining, but the food is top-notch.

For instance, Ducky Restaurant (大嗑西式餐廳) near MRT Shandao Temple Station is a dining pub that specializes in wine and beer. A portion of the staff are chefs who learned from the "Chef of the Century", the late French restaurateur Joël Robuchon. (Read: Michelin Guide Showcases Taipei's Thriving Culinary Scene)

Whisky expert Steven Lin often travels to Europe to study the latest trend. He thinks the Taiwanese view on drinking is outdated. For example, while day drinking “is not a necessity, to define it as a vice is a form of value dissonance.” (Photo by Chien-Tong Wang/CW)

The Cultural Progress of Wining and Dining

Yeh observes that among the many dining pubs to flourish in Taiwan in recent years, those in the style of European taverns and bistros are in the majority. Their drink of choice is usually wine.

Wine is omnipresent in Europe, from the classiest restaurants and dining pubs to the humblest bars. Even truck drivers grabbing a bite in a highway rest stop will order a glass of wine. In Taiwan, wine first made its debut in high-end western restaurants. “But even twenty years ago, people rarely had wine with their western cuisines,” says Yeh.

Peter Pan (潘存懿), Founder of the dining pub “Pan House”, has worked in the wine industry for over a decade. He thinks the root cause is the old Taiwanese misconception that wine is an unapproachable luxury reserved for the wealthy.

In recent years, the population of wine consumers has increased, their average age has drastically decreased, and most of them are women.

Even though wine has become more popular in Taiwan, the market for bars that serve only wines and snacks is still maturing. Three years ago, when Pan first opened his wine bar, he quickly learned customers wanted some food to go with their wine. Because of this, he developed a menu to go with the wines and turned the wine bar into a dining pub.

“Taiwanese people are still used to having some food, especially cooked food, to go with their wine.”

Located in an alley near MRT Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall Station, “Elsewhere” (那裏) is another dining pub that combines food with wine. Co-owner Mei-shu Lin (林美淑) noticed in the last six months, more and more customers came in for a glass of wine without ordering any food during their break, and left within thirty minutes.

In other words, the wine culture is gradually being accepted in Taiwan. Dining pubs helped promote the lifestyle by adjusting wine bars to more closely match the dining habits of Taiwanese gourmets.

Drinking Is Not A Vice! Female Wine Connoisseurs Take the Lead

The advent of dining pubs also signifies liberation from gender stereotypes.

Inside VG Café, a table of ten has sat down to a feast. They are having a grand old time. Only one of them is a man. Look around and you will see the clientage is dominated by women. “Women make up seventy percent of our customers,” says Co-founder Tommy Chen (陳柏翰). Female patrons of VG Café talk intimately with their girl friends over glasses of wine, and they mingle naturally with staff and strangers alike.

This is not unique to VG Café. Yeh observes that young women make up a majority of customers in Taiwanese dining pubs. “This is because female consumers are more accepting of new lifestyles and dining trends.”

Even more importantly, the erroneous and outdated view that women who drink outside the home are easy and promiscuous has been discarded into the dustbin of history. Nowadays, women have emerged as a major buying power that drinks wine and frequents dining pubs in Taiwan.

“Women are more accepting of wine compared to beer and spirits,” observes Pan. He discovered that his wine-tasting courses are mostly attended by women. Customers understand wine lists much better after taking lessons; this in turn drives them to visit dining pubs more often.

Photo by Chien-Tong Wang/CW

Rambo Chang (張維揚) is the Marketing Director at Diageo Taiwan, which is part of a British multinational alcoholic beverages company that mainly sells whisky. He points out that traditionally male-dominated whisky tasting events have witnessed a rise in female participation.

Chang says in the past, it was common for Taiwanese businessmen to have another two or three business parties after dinner. Those gatherings were filled with party games and drinking contests. Being able to hold your liquor was seen as an accomplishment, even a reflection of your socioeconomic status.

But the current generation of 25- to 40-year-old consumers sees things differently. They’re steeped in Western culture and education, and their motive for drinking has gone from merely mercenary reasons to simply wanting to enjoy a good meal and improve their quality of life.

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Another social taboo that’s been broken is the one that says you shouldn’t drink during the day. Whisky expert Steven Lin notes that in Europe, having a drink with your meal during the day is taken for granted. But in Taiwan, imbibing alcohol in the daytime is seen as wrong.

Because of this, Backyard Jr. created the slogan: “Zoe Why Not?” The female name Zoe is a pun on “day drinking” (晝飲). Backyard Jr. is trying to promote day drinking and women’s drinking of whisky at the same time. They even hold alcohol tasting events specially for women.

“While day drinking is not a necessity, to define it as a vice is a form of value dissonance, so I want to change that,” says Lin.

From coffee to good food and wine, the shift in Taiwanese dining fads is a mirror of our society, reflecting the paradigm shift occurring in our social, economic, and gender structures.

Translated by Jack C.

Edited by Sharon Tseng