What the Tteok Pilgrimage Is, and Why Rice Cakes Got Cool

Picture a department-store basement on a weekday morning. The line is not for a handbag or a croissant. It is for rice cakes, wrapped one by one, and on half the phones in the queue someone is pulling one apart on video to show a stripe of fruit and a long stretch of chewy dough.

Koreans already had a phrase for crossing town to a famous bakery: ppangji sullye, a bread pilgrimage. This year a new one caught on. Tteokji sullye, the tteok pilgrimage, means traveling across the city, or the country, for one particular rice-cake shop. Tteok has always been part of Korean life, steamed for birthdays, holidays and housewarmings, but for years younger shoppers filed it under food for their grandparents. What changed is mostly what goes inside and how it looks. Shops now fill glutinous rice cake with fruit, yogurt cream, chocolate ganache or pistachio cream, top steamed rice cake with pizza toppings, and wrap each piece individually so it can be eaten on the walk home. Short videos of the cross-section did the rest.

Texture is the other half of the story. After the Dubai-style chewy cookie craze late last year, chewy became the texture everyone wanted, and rice cake has been doing chewy for centuries. The numbers match the mood: government figures show domestic rice-cake sales rising from 564.1 billion won in 2018 to 962.4 billion won in 2025.

Department stores moved quickly. Lotte Department Store's Jamsil branch ran a tteok pop-up gathering regional rice-cake shops in August, and a second edition from October 9 to 15 brought eight makers to its basement, from Sokcho's Yukgu Bangatgan to Busan's Yeongdo Dari Tteokbang. One of the stars of these pop-ups, a white rice cake topped like a pizza, has its own story in our pizza seolgi guide.

Godiva Mochi: The Line That Starts Before Sunrise

Godiva, the Belgian chocolatier, opened a new store at Lotte World Mall in Jamsil on September 10 and added a menu you can only buy there: mochi. A thin, chewy rice-cake shell wraps Godiva's chocolate ganache, in three styles: praline, fresh fruit such as strawberry, tangerine or banana, and gelato. Prices run roughly 7,500 to 9,000 won a piece, and the store sells only 150 a day.

That cap is what makes the line. Sales start at 10:30 a.m., but by mid-October the first people were arriving the evening before. At 6 a.m. on October 14, the queue stretched more than 100 meters outside the mall, with folding chairs, sleeping bags and a few one-person tents. Shoppers have reported that the day's waiting list can fill by around 6 a.m. Resale posts asking several times the shelf price have followed. They are worth skipping: with a fresh rice cake, you cannot see how it was kept on its way to you.

If you want to try, make it a sunrise plan rather than a quick stop. The waiting area has already been moved once for safety, so check the store's and the mall's official channels for the current spot the day before, and dress for a cool autumn morning. Godiva has said it is considering selling the mochi at more Lotte Department Store locations, but nothing had been confirmed by late October, so assume Lotte World Mall is the only place. The mall sits at the foot of the tower, and our Lotte World Tower and Jamsil guide fills in the rest of the morning once your box is in hand.

Pumpkin Injeolmi: Changeok's Castella-Dusted Rice Cake

Changeok is not new at all. It began in 1965 as a small rice mill in a market in Dongmyeong-dong, Gwangju, in Korea's southwest, and its pumpkin injeolmi dates from the late 1990s. Classic injeolmi is rice cake rolled in roasted soybean powder. Changeok's version is a soft sweet-pumpkin rice cake coated in fine castella crumbs instead, so it eats somewhere between rice cake and sponge cake: soft and chewy inside, light and fluffy outside.

Early this year a popular YouTube review sent it viral. The online shop sold out, and Changeok's main store in Gwangju became a reason to plan a trip, the way Daejeon's Sungsimdang bakery turned bread into a destination. In Seoul, Changeok appears mostly through pop-ups. Its week at The Hyundai Seoul in Yeouido in August drew more than 10,000 visitors, with lines forming hours before the store opened. Pop-ups come and go, so watch the department stores' event pages rather than counting on one being open during your trip.

If your route heads south, the original is the surest way to taste it fresh. Gwangju is about two hours from Seoul by KTX, and the main store in Buk-gu is the one people line up for. The frozen packs sold through Changeok's own online shop are made for home freezers in Korea, so they suit a long stay with a kitchen and a Korean delivery address better than a short hotel visit.

Where to Join the Wave in Seoul

You do not need to cross the country to join in. Seoul's department-store basements have become the main stage. Lotte Department Store's main branch in Sogong-dong, a short walk from Myeongdong, gathers several rice-cake brands in its basement food hall, Hanjungsun among them, while The Hyundai Seoul in Yeouido and the Lotte stores in Jamsil run rotating tteok pop-ups. Counters keep the store's own hours, and the busiest use a digital waiting list, so register first and browse the food hall while you wait. For the fruit-filled rice cakes that set off much of this, our Hanjungsun guide covers the menu, the counters, the queue system and the no-wait GS25 version.

For something calmer, look for the newer independent shops. Myeongryeheon, in Myeongdong, is known for a black sesame injeolmi buried in finely ground sesame and packed in fabric wrapping, which makes it an easy gift. The old guard is still there too. The tteok shops of Nagwon-dong, between Insadong and Jongno 3-ga, sell injeolmi, chapssaltteok and yakgwa honey cookies from long glass counters, and at least one now labels shelf life in English because so many of its customers are visitors.

A few habits help anywhere. Go on a weekday morning, since popular flavors sell out by afternoon. Fresh tteok is best on the day it is made; it firms up in the fridge, so buy what you will eat. And if every line is too long, convenience stores now carry their own rice-cake desserts, from yogurt-filled chapssaltteok to pizza-topped rice cakes. They are not the pop-up, but they are a fair first taste.