🇰🇷 Korea's Traditional Rice Cake Shops Suddenly Have Waiting Lines. Here's the Snack Behind It. (2026)

There's a tiny rice cake shop near my neighborhood that I've walked past for years without ever seeing more than one customer inside at a time. Last month there was a line out the door. I assumed it was a Chuseok rush for songpyeon, but the holiday had already passed, and everyone waiting was holding up their phone to film the counter. What they were actually waiting for had nothing to do with the holiday at all.

It's called pizza-sulgi (피자설기), and the reason a sleepy tteok shop suddenly needed a line is a very specific, very Korean kind of internet moment — one that's now about to show up in convenience store fridges nationwide.

🍕 The Rice Cake That Broke the Internet

Pizza-sulgi takes baekseolgi — a plain, slightly sweet steamed white rice cake — and tops it with tomato sauce, mozzarella, pepperoni, corn, and black olives, then steams or bakes it until the cheese melts into the rice cake underneath. It traces back to Yeongdo-dari Tteokbang, a rice cake shop that's been operating in Busan's Namhang Market since 1999, long before anyone was filming it for social media.

The numbers on how fast this spread are a little absurd. Social mentions went from under 100 posts in April to 2,554 by August and 11,600 by September. Naver search interest for pizza-sulgi was up roughly 1,800% month-over-month and more than 5,000% year-over-year by early October.

🗺️ "떡지순례" — When a Snack Turns Into a Pilgrimage

Korean has a word for what happened next: 떡지순례, roughly "rice cake pilgrimage," the practice of specifically traveling to famous tteok shops the way people used to do for coffee or dessert cafes. There are now more than 5,000 location guides built around it, and the hashtag #떡맛집 alone has around 136,000 posts. It's being driven largely by the MZ generation, wrapped up in what's being called a "할매니얼" aesthetic — "grandmother" nostalgia filtered through very online, very 2026 consumption habits.

💡 Pro tip: If you're actually trying to visit one of the original shops that started this, expect a real line, not a metaphorical one. The appeal is partly the dish and partly the wait itself.

🍳 The Lazy Version Everyone's Actually Making at Home

Standing in line got old fast, so the trend split into a second, funnier phase: people recreating pizza-sulgi at home with whatever's in the freezer. The most common hack presses instant packaged rice flat to stand in for the rice cake base, or uses frozen dumplings microwaved under cheese and sauce instead of steaming an actual rice cake from scratch. Big food brands noticed too — both CJ and Nongshim have rolled out their own branded takes using existing products rather than starting from scratch.

🏪 Convenience Stores Are About to End the Line Entirely

This is the part that actually affects anyone reading this from outside Korea: CU is launching a pizza-flavored jeolpyeon (절편, a different chewy rice cake style than the steamed sulgi version) as a permanent, nationwide item starting October 8 — not a limited test run. The company reportedly moved its original launch timeline up specifically because demand from the trend was outpacing what a handful of specialty tteok shops could produce. Pricing hadn't been published as of this week, but it's expected to land in the usual range for packaged convenience-store rice cake snacks.

🎁 Fun fact: Coupang's own sales data backs up how real this trend is beyond social media hype — traditional rice cake category revenue roughly doubled year-over-year over a recent three-month stretch, product variety expanded by about 80%, and one specific item, a pumpkin injeolmi, grew more than 336%.

• ⚠ Note: If you walk into a convenience store after October 8 and see a pink-and-white-flecked rice cake snack with pepperoni dots on top, that's not a novelty gag item — that's an entire internet trend compressed into a 2,000-ish won snack.

I haven't tried CU's version yet since it isn't on shelves near me quite yet, but given how fast this went from one Busan market stall to a national snack aisle staple, I'm not expecting it to stay a novelty for long. If you want to see what else has been showing up in convenience store fridges lately, there's a rundown of food locals actually order worth a look too.

Either way, the line at my neighborhood tteok shop has finally gone back to normal.

Illustration generated with AI.