Dookki is a chain restaurant offering all you can eat Tteokbokki Korean buffet. What is tteokbokki? It’s the Korean version of a rice cake and usually looks like the Italian penne pasta except solid and made of rice flour.
At $36.80 per person (based on last year – best to check the price) you get a 90 minute sitting where you can eat to your heart’s content and fill up on fried chicken, tteokbokki, noodles, greens, sliced meat, fish cake skewers, rice and its various toppings, plus side dishes like gyoza, kimchi and more. There’s also ice cream (chocolate and strawberry) and soft drink included in the price.
It is my first time trying the restaurant and I don’t have a booking as there is no online booking tool and I forgot to ring up. Luckily my friend arrives first and scores the last table for two for a Friday evening. Each table is dressed up with various bowls, plates and the hot pot in the middle sitting on a small burner. One of the staff talks us through what we need to do and there’s also written instructions on the table. Our waitress pours some broth into the hot pot and turns the burner on.
I’m impressed with the tteokbokki station with 10 types of tteokbokki. I’ve never seen so much! I choose a few different varieties – the extra thick noodle, what I’m going to call ‘clump of shapes’, sweet potato plus the traditional tteokbokki. There are also other flavoured tteokbokki like sausage, corn cheese ball, cheese wheat and various lengths and widths of noodle type tteok.
How does it work?
Basically grab all the ingredients you want in a hot pot – tteokbokki, noodles, greens, veggies, sliced pork and beef, fish cake and fish balls. Then grab the little pot and choose your sauces (there’s 8 to choose from like bulgogi, garlic, busan, cream, Dongdaemun, jjajang sauces and more). There’s even recommendations of the combinations and ratios of sauces! We are not adventurous and stick with a bulgogi and garlic sauce mix. Then head back to your table and put everything into the hot pot and wait for it to bubble, cook and eat.
For dessert, there are two flavours of ice cream, cookies, mandarins and watermelon on offer.
Overall I had a really good experience at Dookki. Being our first time, the wait staff explained how it all works and came back to fill the hot pot with broth, pour in our ingredients and mix it all up for us. The 90 minute session might seem short, but it doesn’t take long to boil the contents of the hot pot, plus tteok is so filling! We barely finished the items we added to the pot and were very full after the 70 minute mark. If you go with a bigger group, you will have more hot pots and hence more sauces to choose from to flavour the broth. Bookings essential!
See reel of the experience below:
Dookki Belconnen
2 Grazier Lane, Belconnen, Canberra
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