Savor Scout › Food guides › Mochi
How to find good mochi
Mochi is pounded glutinous rice — soft, stretchy and chewy — formed into sweets. Fresh mochi is a completely different experience from the frozen supermarket version, and it is best eaten the day it is made.
What separates a good one from a bad one
- Made fresh — Soft and pillowy. Mochi hardens within a day.
- Good anko — Sweet red bean paste, smooth or chunky, not too sugary.
- Seasonal varieties — Sakura mochi in spring, strawberry daifuku in winter.
- Light dusting — Potato starch or kinako (roasted soybean flour).
- A Japanese confectioner (wagashi-ya) — Specialist shops make the best mochi.
What to order
- Daifuku — Mochi filled with red bean.
- Strawberry daifuku — Seasonal and excellent.
- Mochi ice cream — Ice cream wrapped in mochi.
- Warabi mochi — Bracken starch jelly with kinako.
- Butter mochi — Hawaiian baked mochi cake.
Where to find Mochi
Mochi is mostly found at Japanese restaurants, so that is where to look. Open listings put 13,468 of them across the US, and these are the cities and campuses with the most.
Cities with the most
New York, NY 528 Los Angeles, CA 274 San Francisco, CA 192 Honolulu, HI 192 Las Vegas, NV 148 Seattle, WA 122 Chicago, IL 121 San Diego, CA 94
Campuses with the most within a mile
NYU 176 Touro University 163 The Graduate Center 163 Baruch 162 New School University 154 FIT 132
A few to start with
- icca — New York, NY
20 Warren St, New York - Azay — Los Angeles, CA
226 1st St, Los Angeles - Zaoh — San Francisco, CA
1555 Mission St, San Francisco - Irifune Restaurant — Honolulu, HI
850 Mililani St, Honolulu - Bocho Sushi — Las Vegas, NV
124 S 6th St Ste 150, Las Vegas - joybento — Seattle, WA
214 Madison St, Seattle
Counts are listings in Overture Maps open data (September 2026), counted by the town in each address. Independent places only in the examples above, and they are a starting point rather than a ranking.
How Savor Scout looks for it
The search reads for fresh mochi, daifuku, wagashi and Japanese sweets, and surfaces specialist shops and bakeries alongside restaurants.
Looking in a particular city?
Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.
- New York, NY
- Los Angeles, CA
- Chicago, IL
- Houston, TX
- Philadelphia, PA
- Phoenix, AZ
- San Antonio, TX
- San Diego, CA
- Dallas, TX
- San Jose, CA
- Austin, TX
- Indianapolis, IN
- Jacksonville, FL
- San Francisco, CA
- Columbus, OH
- Charlotte, NC
- Fort Worth, TX
- Detroit, MI
- El Paso, TX
- Memphis, TN
- Seattle, WA
- Denver, CO
- Washington, DC
- Boston, MA
- Nashville, TN
- Baltimore, MD
- Oklahoma City, OK
- Louisville, KY
- Portland, OR
- Las Vegas, NV
- Milwaukee, WI
- Albuquerque, NM
- Tucson, AZ
- Fresno, CA
- Sacramento, CA
- Long Beach, CA
- Kansas City, MO
- Mesa, AZ
- Virginia Beach, VA
- Atlanta, GA
- Colorado Springs, CO
- Omaha, NE
- Raleigh, NC
- Miami, FL
- Oakland, CA
- Minneapolis, MN
- Tulsa, OK
- Cleveland, OH
- Wichita, KS
- Arlington, TX
- New Orleans, LA
- Bakersfield, CA
- Tampa, FL
- Honolulu, HI
- Aurora, CO
- Anaheim, CA
- Santa Ana, CA
- St. Louis, MO
- Riverside, CA
- Corpus Christi, TX