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In the middle of Korean street food restaurant Miss ary in Strathfield, on wooden tables lit by glowing red lights with winking eyes and tiny white-gloved hands, sit bowls of tteokbokki.

Seated customers surround them, slurping the dish’s rich, spicy mix of chewy Korean wheat cakes (tteok), stir-fried (bokki) and served in a sweet and savoury crimson sauce made with fermented chilli condiment gochujang.

I am one of them, alternately swishing finger-length tubes of wheat cake, bookmark-like slices of fish cake and freshly shredded shallot through the house-made sauce.

It’s the sort of dish you can’t stop eating. Hot, tangy and sugary, with added smoky, umami flavours. There is so much going on with each mouthful.

Tteokbokki, or tok bok ki as it’s spelt on the Miss ary menu, is one of the after-school snacks that chef Giwan Kim and pastry chef Sun Young Park, the husband and wife owners of this eight-month-old restaurant, ate growing up in South Korea. “It’s what we’d go with friends to buy together from our pocket money,” Park says.

Tteokbokki, which is offered here in versions ranging from cheese sausage and mozzarella cheese, creamy rose sauce (a bestseller), or with the much hotter mala Sichuan peppercorn and chilli seasoning, can also be paired with fried squid, American sliced cheese, vegetable fritter, prawn cutlets and barbecue wagyu bulgogi. The fried rice and kimchi version adds a tuna mayo version.

Miss ary’s tteokbokki’s popularity is only matched by its Korean fried chicken, each a spectacularly golden and tender crumple of crunch. There’s also seven kinds of kim bab, also known as gimbap and kimbap, a seaweed-wrapped roll sometimes mistaken for sushi.

The kim bab here, packed with seasoned rice, egg radish pickle, crabstick, cucumber and carrot, is fresh, nutty and beautiful. Dip it into supplied mustard soy sauce between mouthfuls of truffle and snowy cheese-covered hot chips, gooey corn cheese, hot dog toast or a kim bab burger.

The latter is Kim and Park’s invention, first created for their still-running food truck parked in Mount Druitt. It’s a burger twist with bread buns swapped for seasoned rice and a seaweed wrap, and fillings ranging from barbecue wagyu bulgogi to garlic soy fried chicken, Japanese fish katsu and vegetarian and cheese fritter.

These are marvellous, sink-your-teeth-in wonders, entirely different to doughy burgers via their seasoned rice freshness. The stand-out is the southern-style wagyu barbecue bulgogi, a sweet and salty umami mix of marinated beef, spicy honey ssamjang and Korean mayonnaise. Juicy, smoky, spicy, finger-licking stuff.

Park, who has also worked at Bourke Street Bakery, says she and Kim built the food truck, which has a cute square-edged design, by hand with materials ordered from Korea. “It’s the first Korean food truck in Australia,” she says.

The pair, who came to Australia in 2008 but only met while training at Le Cordon Bleu in Sydney, previously ran popular modern Korean restaurant SOG (short for “sanctuary of god”) in Abbotsford.

“People loved SOG, but it wasn’t cheap to run,” Park says. “It was casual fine dining using expensive ingredients. When COVID-19 happened, we closed it and decided to concentrate on Korean comfort food.”

They moved to Mount Druitt, opened the food truck and built a following for their takeaway menu, along with tteokbokki meal kits. “But, we were looking for a new restaurant space again because we wanted people to come in and enjoy our food,” Park says. “Now we do, in Strathfield.”

The restaurant, which sits opposite Strathfield Plaza, has incredibly affordable prices. If you order a platter, which feeds four to five people, the bill would be less than $10 each.

Match it with citrusy Korean blue lemonade, Screw Bar (strawberry sherbet) soda, Melona (green melon) soda, and extremely cute bunny milk puddings that wobble on the plate while you douse them in caramel or citrus topping and eat their ears.

There is also no “Miss Ary”. The name comes from Kim and Park’s faith and the word missionary. The “i” and “o” are inside the business’ logo.

“We want to make food that makes you feel warm and happy,” Park says. “It’s part of our restaurant’s welcome to everyone, from youngest to oldest people.”