Savor Scout › Food guides › Tteokbokki
How to find good tteokbokki
Tteokbokki is Korean street food — cylindrical rice cakes simmered in a sweet, spicy gochujang sauce with fish cakes — and it has become one of the most searched-for Korean dishes in America.
What separates a good one from a bad one
- Chewy, fresh rice cakes — Soft on the outside, pleasantly chewy inside. Hard or dried-out rice cakes are disappointing.
- A sauce with depth — Gochujang, gochugaru, anchovy stock and sugar. Sweet and spicy but not cloying.
- Fish cakes and boiled egg — Eomuk and a boiled egg are traditional additions.
- Add-ons — Ramen noodles (rabokki), cheese, dumplings or fried seaweed rolls. Many shops let you build your own.
- Spice levels you can choose — Good shops let you pick.
What to order
- Classic tteokbokki — With fish cakes and egg.
- Rabokki — With ramen noodles.
- Cheese tteokbokki — Melted mozzarella on top.
- Rosé tteokbokki — Cream and gochujang.
- Twigim — Fried snacks to dip in the sauce.
Where to find Tteokbokki
Tteokbokki is mostly found at Korean restaurants, so that is where to look. Open listings put 4,292 of them across the US, and these are the cities and campuses with the most.
Cities with the most
Los Angeles, CA 284 New York, NY 211 Las Vegas, NV 69 Chicago, IL 67 Honolulu, HI 66 San Francisco, CA 61 Buena Park, CA 57 Houston, TX 48
Campuses with the most within a mile
Baruch 107 Touro University 97 FIT 95 The Graduate Center 95 New School University 84 NYU 51
A few to start with
- Seoul Sausage Company — Los Angeles, CA
236 S Los Angeles St, Los Angeles - KOBA Korean BBQ — New York, NY
136 William St, New York - KIO Korean Fried Chicken — Las Vegas, NV
809 N Main St, Las Vegas - Lai Lai Korean Express — Chicago, IL
330 S Wells St, Chicago - My BBQ — Honolulu, HI
1001 Bishop St, Honolulu - Jang — San Francisco, CA
22 Franklin St, San Francisco
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 tteokbokki, rabokki and Korean street food, and surfaces specialist snack shops as well as Korean 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
Related food guides
Korean food, Korean fried chicken, bibimbap