Nam Dae Moon

Nam Dae Moon Rice Cake is the first Korean rice cake shop in Vancouver that allows you to order steamed rice cakes fresh to order! They offer a variety of traditional steamed rice cakes made with rice flour or glutinous rice flour and filled mochi desserts to choose from. When you walk up to the store, there’s usually a line up because they only allow 2 parties in the store at once.

Before you get into the store, there is a staff member that goes over the menu items with you. Then, they let you know how you can store them upon purchase if you don’t eat it all at once. This was really helpful because there are specific ways to store them to keep them fresh. When you get into the store, you’re greeted by photos of menu items and a staff member making fresh mochi behind the counter.

Nam Dae Moon offers an assortment of traditional rice cake flavours but they also have more “modern” ones to cater to newer customers. Glutinous rice cake flavours include red bean, black bean, sesame, and soy bean. Rice cake flavours include osmanthus, chestnut date, pumpkin, black kernel, and oreo chocolate lava. Last but not least, they have a bunch of mochi to choose from including durian, mango, milky banana, strawbery, salted oreo cream with ferrero rocher, purple sweet potato with red bean, salted egg yolk with pork floss, taro with meat floss and coconut rice cake with nuts.

Osmanthus rice cake

We decided to try out the osmanthus rice cakes. There are 8 in a box and they are topped with a “jelly” with osmanthus flavour. The rice cakes were softy fluffy and lightly sweetened. I didn’t taste much of the osmanthus flavour because there wasn’t very much of it in proportion to the rest of the rice cake. We didn’t finish all of them the day of so I had to freeze them over night. The reason why they ask you to freeze them is so that they don’t dry out and they lose their fluffy texture. The next day, I took them out of the freezer and steamed them for 5-10 minutes until they were soft again. They tasted the same but were a little firmer than the day before.

I’m not sure if I would come again for myself because nothing really excited me about the rice cakes. On top of that, needing to re-steam the rice cakes to eat the next day made them inconvenient to have as a snack. With that said, I think they are great gifts and have really nice packaging for that too.