88 Topokki

Toppokki, toppoki, tteokbokki, ddeokbokki, and however else you decide to spell it, is utterly delicious. Little strips of rice cakes that have a very satisfying chew, you can have them in their signature gochujang spicy sauce with fish balls and other goodies or as an accompaniment to your favourite hotpot! H., tells me its an iconic part of your childhood growing up in South Korea, the perfect quick meal or after school snack alongside Korean fried chicken of course! I will use the word tteokbokki for the rest of this page as it is my preferred spelling and what Wikipedia uses, if its good enough for wiki, its good enough for me.

So when we found out there was a shop called 88 Toppokki, we were extremely excited and had to go. Except we kept forgetting it was closed on Tuesdays. Oops. Its located in the Pinelands Shopping centre so its easy to get parking. Its located in the centre of the shop near the fruit shop.

Thats us!

Random 88 photos

Here are some terrible photos of the menu, otherwise check out Zomato for clearer ones.

The first time I went here was when I was looking for some fried chicken after work. I bought myself half a honey soy chicken for takeaway and chose the tteokbokki as my side. I like that you can choose between several different sides such as the grilled tteokbokki on a stick, rice, chips, regular stir fried tteokbokki or prawn and veggies. I love variety!

This fried chicken was very crispy and moist but I found the sauce a touch sweet so it's not my absolute favourite fried chicken to have. That being said, its definitely not bad though, and lots of people agree with me! They do a deal of 10 drumsticks for $10 and its always sold out when I try and get it.

Yassss

The stir fried tteokbokki is the regular tteokbokki you would order at any Korean restaurant, barring the fact that this is much more obviously a home style slash side dish version. How can you tell? The sheer number of bulk veggies present! Carrot, cabbage, green onion and zucchini a plenty, the fish cakes aren't as prominent but this is still an enjoyable dish. Just think of this as balancing out that chicken you just got! The sauce is a wonderful fluorescent orange from the spicy gochujang paste but despite that its not unbearably spicy like Madtongsan's tteokbokki, you can happily still eat this without stopping.

Yassss

I went back here a second time with H., and A*! H., and I had the same days off and were tossing up between here and Rogue Spice Canteen. H., insisted that we should eat the special hotpot while I was arguing that we couldn't possibly finish a hotpot off between us. Then I saw A* was online on Facebook and I knew she would come with us because she freaking loves tteokbokki. She loves it so much that once when we went to a Korean restaurant, she made us leave because it didn't sell tteokbokki, that was the time we went to FunnyFunny for dinner.

Anyway, we got the triple fried chicken plate, it came with honey soy chicken, plain fried chicken and a sweet and spicy sauce fried chicken. there was also a lightly dressed garden salad that we mostly ignored. A* loves plain fried chicken. I have a deep love of honey soy fried chicken and guess what H., loves? That's right, spicy fried chicken. We were the perfect team hahaha!

<333

We also got these banchan to go with our fried chicken from left to right its caramelised sweet potato, kimchi and soy marinated fish cakes! I love the sweet potato and the fish cakes the most, I could eat an entire bowl of these without getting sick. I often find myself having to move them away from me so I can't actually get to them before my main meal arrives.

Yesssss

H., was prodding us towards getting the special hotpot and I was being annoying by saying there was no guarantee that A* would agree to getting it. A* is an easy going girl though and she did agree. We got this in the regular size with three additional toppings which cost an extra $8-10 from memory. The ones we picked were an extra serve of deep fried seaweed rolls, quail eggs and tteokbokki since it didn't automatically come with them in there. There are a lot of other ingredients included in the hotpot such as spam, bulgogi beef, pork belly, enoki mushrooms, sweet potato noodles, calamari, deep fried gyoza, whole eggs, cabbage, mussels, prawns, onions, garlic, deep fried seaweed rolls and ramen noodles. We were told by our waitress to eat the deep fried gyoza and seaweed rolls first otherwise they would get too soggy. The soup had a wonderful savoury flavour that wasn't too spicy the best part was fishing out all the different ingredients to eat, you never knew what you were going to get!

H., loves deep fried seaweed rolls and she said this was the first place in Brisbane that she found made them. They're a battered roll of sushi seaweed that is wrapped around a bundle of soft vermicelli noodles, sounds kind of bland but the batter is really tasty! It tastes exactly like the batter on the plain fried chicken.

I really enjoy eating Korean hotpot much more than our Vietnamese version, lau, or Chinese style hotpot just due to the sheer number of ingredients present. Also for the fact that its already layered in for me, where as I would have to grab everything I want and dunk it in. Korean hotpot is already perfectly portioned to boil down to thick saucy goodness! It goes without saying that this place does the best hotpot I've found in Brisbane so far!

So so good!

88 Topokki
Atmosphere: 7, a cosy little place to hide from the world, as we did when it was absolutely bucketing down the day we went. 
Service: 7, pretty good actually. The shop is quite small so the waitresses are always lurking nearby, ready to help or top up your banchan dishes!
Food: 9, I love their hotpots and their fried chicken isn't bad either! I love that you can add whatever you want to the hotpot as well <3