Do you avoid alcohol ever? I find lately I’m doing that more and more, not that I have any doctors order or evidence to tell me to stop… yet; it’s more like my thoughts on drinking are similar to my thoughts about Global Warming as a layman, “surely all these toxins we’re using can’t be good for this earth”. Well, ditto years of drinking fantastic wines, spirits, beers, plus knowing people for whom drinking became an extreme and dangerous sport. So, being taken to what’s known as a sober bar” in Taiwan was very intriguing, what on earth would it be like?
Abvless, with the abv prefix a drinks industry acronym for “alcohol by volume”, is the sort of bar that today is called a modern speakeasy. Originally these were bars hidden away where you could drink spirits without the police nabbing you during the prohibition era. But today, in a twist, abvless [their preference is to write it lowercase] is a speakeasy where you can quietly sip non-alcoholic drinks without any of the peer pressure and temptation than can happen in more spirited venues. It’s only open in the daytime for now – 12:00 until 19:00 – and there’s not really food served, so think of it as a meeting place before eating, or for meetings, or just a change from a coffee house.
It’s located in the Zhongshan District of Taipei, which back in the 60s-70s was a thriving tourist area, but as the decades went on it attracted hostess bars and crime, then in the last 20 years it fell onto hard times. Now, one interesting aspect to this sort of negative trajectory for a city district that it doesn’t immediately attract redevelopment because of the reputation of the area. So for a moment, and Zhongshan is possibly still in this moment, it has become very desirable for young creative people, as it still has run-down but beautiful old buildings.
The building that abvless is located in was built under Japanese-rule in the 1920s and uses, according to Harpers Bazaar Taiwan, uses a Japanese-inspired Wabi Sabi design aesthetic, and was nominated for a Restaurant & Bar Design Awards 2022 award. A key factor in both the design and the drinks themselves was the Buddhist idea of timelessness expressed by the phrase yī shí 一時, “one moment” or as a friend describes it “an interval free from the usual divisions and activities that structure our lives, inviting reflection on the nature of existence beyond conventional boundaries”. Which is what I look for in a bar, a place to be still for one moment (ok, I like quiet bars).
Created and founded by Malaysian-Chinese Adrian Ng, he opened the bar in February 2020 just as COVID started to closed everything down. Ng had been working with Bar Washu in Taipei, which has one of the most extensive Japanese whiskey and Shochu collections in Taiwan. According to Vogue Taiwan, Ng found this run down mansion house in the Zhongshan District of Taipei, and “combined with the space design, we worked with the designer to introduce the ‘wabi-sabi’ style, using sleepers from train tracks, driftwood picked up by the seaside, old pieces, and dinner plates and cups with broken beauty, echoing Wabi Sabi’s world view of ‘imperfection, incompleteness, and impermanence’.” Ng told me it’s all about “learning about the beauty of imperfection”. It reminded me very slightly of John Moore’s “House of Beauty and Culture” from the 1980s (very few photographs of the interior still exist, there are a couple here on the Victoria & Albert Museum website).
This one is called their “Americano” and as the name suggests, it merges both the coffee and cocktail that share the name into one. “The dark colour is from a cold-brew coffee concentrate,” says Ng, “and originally the alcoholic version would be made with Campari, Sweet Vermouth and Soda Water. So here I’ve used a non-alcoholic herbal bitters mixed with non-alcoholic sparkling wine, cold-brew coffee, and tonic water served on ice.”
Next, a blend of Edenvale’s non-alcoholic chardonnay with chilled Taiwanese tea into a simple, elegant mixed drink. Using the terms “cocktail” or “mocktail” doesn’t seem right here as to a western customer the words perhaps suggest something more frou-frou, whereas what Ng is producing is, in a way, serious purposeful drinks that have a apparent simplicity in their taste and appearance.
This is based on the original Aperol Spritz idea, which would have used Aperol, Prosecco, and soda water. So instead here I’ve emphasised the citrus flavour with Citrus Tawianica marmalade from KeYa, blended with a little warmth to make it extra smooth, then stirred with Aperitif Rosso to add some bitterness, then filtered to remove any rind or pith, then mixed with a non-alcoholic sparkling Mousseux from Carl Jung Winery in Germany
Bar abvless
Address: No. 18, Lane 26, Section 2, Zhongshan North Road, Zhongshan District, Taipei City
Opening hours: Wednesday to Sunday 12:00-19:00
(please check their Facebook page for details)
