GelatoSpots

Research edition

Taiwan

Taipei

Snow ice is neither shaved ice nor ice cream. What is a category actually for?

Taipei's ice-cream culture runs on two tracks that rarely appear together elsewhere: an imported Italian gelato scene built by makers who trained abroad and compete in world gelato championships, and a native frozen-dairy tradition, snow ice, that Taiwan itself invented in 1970 and that no other ice-cream city has. Double V's founder Willson Chen placed in the Marco Polo International Gelato Cup and wrote Taiwan's reference textbook on gelato and sorbet formulation; On the Road and Gelato Arjan run daily-changing, unchurned-nothing-premade counters on ordinary residential streets in Tianmu and Dadaocheng, competing for the same customers as bubble tea stands. Smoothie House's mango snow ice, built from a flavoured-milk block rather than plain water ice, was named by CNN as one of the 40 Taiwanese foods worth flying in for. The city's talent draws on Taiwan's own fruit terroir, DOP Sicilian pistachio and Uji matcha as readily as it does Da Jia taro and Puli passion fruit. Whether that counts as one coherent case for 'best in the world' or two adjacent ones is the open question this file is built to hand off.

Last checked 2026-08-21

The selected spots

3 selected

  1. 01

    Double V

    gelato · Willson Chen (陳謙璿), chef and founder

    Double V is the clearest case in Taipei of a maker treating gelato as a technical discipline worth writing a textbook about, not a novelty menu. Nine years and 600+ published flavours in, it is independently described by two different named journalists as Taipei's most representative Italian-style gelato shop.

  2. 02

    PAI PAI CANNOLI & GELATO

    gelato · 周柏宏 (Scott Chou), founder and head chef

    A chef with a named, checkable Michelin-adjacent training credential building a savoury, olive-oil-and-balsamic gelato identity that is deliberately not fruit-forward — a genuinely distinctive technical position within Taipei's gelato scene.

  3. 03

    Nice Cream

    gelato · Founded by an Italian owner in 2016; personal name not stated in any source opened

    The clearest fully-plant-based gelato-technique maker found in Taipei, with international vegan-food-press recognition (self-reported) and Taiwan-specific fruit sourcing (Puli passion fruit) alongside its core allergen-free positioning.

Research notes

City boundary

Taipei City. New Taipei City is separate.