Seoul on table
Sindang-dong tteokbokki Town
Our patience quickly runs out as we watch tteokbokki boiling in a pot. You lift a stick of rice cake and blow on it before putting it in your mouth. It is spicy and hot, but you keep grabbing the sticks of rice cake one after another until you feel full. Still, it is hard to put down your chopsticks. You dump a bowl of rice into the sauce, make fried rice, and eat the rice before you finally put down the chopsticks. tteokbokki is one of the favorite snacks and most popular street foods for Koreans, and its history tteokbokki started in Sindang-dong.
📝Text by. Editorial Team / 📷Illustrated by. Gyeol
The Cradle of Sweet, Spicy
tteokbokki, the Nation’s Favorite Snack
The worn-out signs and rich aroma of gochujang or red pepper paste wafting in the air show how long this place has been around. Sindangdong tteokbokki Town dates back to more than 60 years. The origin of Sindangdong tteokbokki can be traced back to Grandma Bongnim Ma who has rewritten the history of the national snack.
Today, tteokbokki is typically served in gochujang sauce, so it is called “Gochujang tteokbokki,” and Ms. Ma is the original creator of this new type of tteokbokki. Up until the 1950s, there had been no red tteokbokki in the culinary history of Korea. It was purely by accident that Ms. Ma came up with the idea of making tteokbokki in gochujang sauce. In 1953 when the Korean War ended, she accidentally dropped rice cake in a bowl of black bean noodles. She ate it and it tasted so good. Inspired by the unexpected good taste of rice cake dipped in black bean sauce, she decided to make a special sauce for tteokbokki by coming up with different kinds of sauces including chungjang (black bean sauce) and gochujang (red pepper paste).
She started selling tteokbokki by putting up a stand on the street. She stir-fried big chunks of rice cake in gochujang. People started to flock to her stand, enchanted by the sweet, spicy smell. Rice cake cooked in sweet, spicy gochujang sauce was a great snack for everyone, men and women, young and old when everybody was so poor no one could afford to eat a nice meal at a restaurant. Later, she further developed the recipe. She dumped rice cake, vegetables, gochujang, and chunjang altogether in a big pot and boiled it over a burning briquette, which led to the birth of what is known today as “instant tteokbokki.” Sindangdong tteokbokki reached its pinnacle of popularity in the 1970s. It was introduced on MBC’s popular national radio show “Women’s Salon by Kuk-hee Lim.” Soon, the new type of tteokbokki went viral fast by word of mouth. Adding fuel to the growing popularity of Sindangdong tteokbokki, a movie theater opened right at the entrance of the tteokbokki street, and Sindang-dong quickly emerged as a new mecca for young people. Incorporating youth-friendly, entertaining elements such as music box and DJs into tteokbokki places was a stroke of brilliance that made the area one of the hottest hangouts among the young generation. Young men and women were constantly drawn to Sindangdong tteokbokki Town where they made good memories, built friendship, and fell in love.
Over the last 60 years, Sindangdong tteokbokki Town has been a hip location, and it is now enjoying a renaissance. Known as “Hipdangdong,” the tteokbokki town characterized by a unique combination of old and new is attracting people from all walks of life regardless of gender and age.
