In 2023, the Los Angeles izakaya Budonoki, then just some weeks outdated, determined to “gown up” as a special sort of restaurant for Halloween. For one night time, the Japanese restaurant remodeled into an Italian trattoria with Negroni slushes, arancini, and checkered tablecloths. Somebody on employees provided the pun “Budo-gnocchi,” recollects co-owner Eric Bedroussian. “We had been like, wait, that’s truly actually good.”
No person within the kitchen had experience in making pasta and nobody had a lot curiosity in making gnocchi from scratch, so the workforce reached for one thing extra handy: Korean rice muffins, also referred to as tteok. Like gnocchi, rice muffins provide a bouncy chew, particularly the lengthy cylindrical rice muffins that the restaurant makes use of. (Tteok will also be present in flatter rounds which are sliced on the diagonal.) The workforce steamed the rice muffins to melt them, then seared them to create a crisp outer layer. Sauteed mushrooms, a dashi-butter pan sauce, and Parmigiano-Reggiano rounded out the pasta-like vibe.
The Budo-gnocchi was “so extremely well-received,” Bedroussian says, that it needed to change into part of the everlasting menu. It hit the notes the restaurant was going for with each different dish. “It’s comforting and it fills you up in the event you’ve been consuming loads,” he says. As soon as a cheerful accident, Budo-gnocchi has since change into a signature dish on the restaurant, which was named an Eater Finest New Restaurant in 2024.
The dish has since advanced right into a unfastened template, altering with the whims of the kitchen. The restaurant may improve it by ending with black truffle shavings, or bringing in corn and tomatoes in the summertime. “It may be no matter we would like it to be,” Bedroussian says.
As Korean delicacies features recognition throughout the US, rice muffins — a well-liked avenue meals — have established themselves as a promising ingredient for cooks cooking each inside and outdoors Korean delicacies. Whilst you’ll discover them forged as different varieties of noodles (Sunny Lee’s baked ziti-like rice muffins at New York Metropolis’s Sunn’s, for instance, or chef Beverly Kim’s tteokbokki pad Thai at Chicago’s Parachute HiFi), cooks particularly like the best way their playful, chewy texture makes them a pure substitute for gnocchi. This concept isn’t totally novel; in a 2006 New York Instances evaluation of New York’s Momofuku Ssäm Bar, Pete Wells really helpful the rice muffins topped with Sichuan pork ragu and whipped tofu as “lifeless ringers for gnocchi.”
Cooks in Korea have been engaged on an identical culinary observe for a short while now too. Historically, eating places and avenue stalls typically use tteok to make tteokbokki, by which the rice muffins are simmered in sauce that’s barely candy, spicy, and fiery crimson from gochujang. Lately, they’ve been riffing with rosé tteokbokki, which provides cream to the everyday tteokbokki base, impressed by each the Italian rosé sauce and Korean-style carbonara.
“Italian meals usually has change into extra standard in Korea,” says bar proprietor and forthcoming cookbook writer Irene Yoo. Provided that Korean-style carbonara is made with cream and served with ham or peas, breaking from Italian custom, rosé tteokbokki is “an interpretation of one other interpretation,” she says.
Throughout the U.S., rice muffins have lately transcended pasta dishes altogether. In New York Metropolis alone, there’s the culinary boundary-blurring rice cake fundido at Haenyeo; the nacho-like chopped cheese rice muffins at Nowon; rice muffins bulking up galbi bourguignon alongside potatoes at Sinsa; and blanketed with mornay sauce till they resemble gratin at Gurume.
At Yoo’s Orion Bar in Brooklyn, rice muffins additionally flip candy, morphing into churros: deep-fried till puffy and crispy on the skin, then tossed in cinnamon sugar and served with cream cheese-makgeolli dip. “I grew up in LA, so I undoubtedly had loads of churros rising up,” Yoo says. Whereas testing deep-fried rice muffins, “I instantly considered that as a style reminiscence.”
For chef Nick Wong of Houston’s new “fashionable Asian American diner,” Agnes and Sherman, a dish of rice muffins with beef ragu stuffed the slot for a “comforting, saucy starch” on the menu, since there’s no pasta. It additionally represents a “sort of ‘if you understand, you understand’ state of affairs,” he says. Wong spent years cooking at Ssäm Bar, so the dish is partly a reference to the ragu rice muffins there, although with pork instead of beef as a result of “it’s Texas,” Wong says, and to account for Houston’s Muslim inhabitants.
Extra particular to Houston, the dish has one other reference: The Korean braised goat and dumplings, additionally made with rice muffins, was the signature dish at Chris Shepherd’s now-closed Underbelly; the dish was beloved for the best way it evoked the meals of many various cultures. With a sauce that includes Korean gochujang and doenjang, West African uda pepper, and Mexican chile de árbol, Wong’s rendition is emblematic of Houston, the place, he says, “it’s laborious to inform the place one factor ends and one other factor begins.” With regards to his rice cake dish, Houstonians “simply get it,” he says.
With all its iterations, Budo-gnocchi is a “chameleon” too, Bedroussian says. For a latest collab dinner with Indian sports activities bar Pijja Palace — an Eater Finest New Restaurant that’s identified for its malai rigatoni (pasta with a creamy tomato masala) — the 2 eating places served malai Budo-gnocchi. It’s a little bit little bit of all the things: Italian, Indian, Korean, all via the lens of an LA riff on a Japanese izakaya. Between all these influences, rice muffins are within the center, bridging the hole.
