Craving the singular chew that only tteokbokki can deliver, I made my way to Young Dabang, a South Korean street food chain with its only Orange County location in Irvine. Tteokbokki, for the uninitiated, is a dish of chewy, cylindrical rice cakes (tteok) that are typically slicked with a spicy savory-sweet sauce.
I opted for the tteokbokki with grilled brisket. It arrived at the table in a shallow steel pan, a hot, bubbling base of rice cakes topped with a bonanza of tastes and textures: a tangle of thinly sliced brisket, fish cake, a handful of veggies, instant ramen, a fried dumpling (yaki mandu) and a boiled quail egg. The sauce, which I ordered spicy, was hot, smoky and slightly sweet, laced with gochugaru (dried red pepper flakes). More wan palettes can order it mild or hot-mild.
A small order costs $16, and a large runs $26.99. Both are plenty big.
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While tteokbokki has a long history in royal cuisine, the spicier, modern version was introduced after the postwar years.
According to Maangchi, the popular YouTube Korean-cooking star and cookbook author dubbed “YouTube’s Korean Julia Child” by The New York Times, there are many variations on the dish. “Some people add dumplings (mandu), some add cabbage, cheese (mozzarella cheese seems popular) or ramen noodles,” she wrote in a post on the dish. “Creamy, saucy rosé tteokbokki was popular for a while, and a few hundred years ago the Korean royal court enjoyed nonspicy, soy-sauce based gungjung tteokbokki.”
“When I was a student coming home from school it was hard to resist the spicy rice cakes sold by vendors on the street,” she recalled.
Maricel Gentile, chef and author of “Maricel’s Simply Asian Cookbook,” adds that today’s version is credited to Ma Bok-rim, “who in the 1950s took the original tteokbokki, which was soy sauce-based, and used gochujang instead.”
Young Dabang offers other tteokbokki varieties, too, including cheese waterfall (with melted mozzarella), whole fried squid, original, spicy chicken, pork katsu and bulgogi, as well as a creamy carbonara version inspired by the Roman pasta dish. They can also be made “rosé-style” with a slip of cream in the sauce.
And at the risk of sounding unrefined, Young Dabang’s tteokbokki would have also made excellent morning-after fare were I still a drinking person.
Young Dabang can be found inside the Diamond Jamboree Shopping Center, which also features choice eateries like Sul & Beans, Yigah and Pepper Lunch.
Find it: 2750 Alton Parkway, lrvine