Nak Won Korean Bakery

This place has the best dduk (rice cakes) in Chicago! I always get the een-​jul-​mee (the brown/​tan powdery one). It’s soo good and fresh, and only $ 3 for a pack! Try it, you’ll like it! Trust me. :) For Korean breads, go to Dokil Bakery!

This small Korean shop specializes in tteok, which are glutinous rice flour cakes. They make the sweets in this location and then sell them to Korean grocery stores, but you can also walk in and buy the tteok directly from them (just like New Chicago Kimchee nearby). Until recently, the store itself was bare and none of the products were on display. But a couple weeks ago, they decided to set up a table with several varieties of tteok to choose from.
I walked in and checked out the goods. They had songpyeon (small colorful round rice cakes filled with sweet sesame paste), garaetteok (rice cake formed into long white cylinders, used for tteokbokki), chapsal (round rice cakes filled with sweet red bean paste), jeolpyeon (white and green flat patterned rice cake), injeolmi (glutinous pounded rice cake covered with soybean powder), and more.
I decided to purchase a small package of injeolmi, which were cut into cubes (they resembled homemade square marshmallows). These were far from the chewy rice cakes I’ve had in the past. They were incredibly soft, with just a hint of sweetness. The soybean powder melts in your mouth. I consider this to be more of a snack than a dessert, but there are other sweeter options in the store. Yes, you can purchase tteok in any Korean grocery store, but there’s a certain charm in buying it directly from the source.