(Photo courtesy of haps Magazine Korea)
I grew up thinking Koreans were a little strange for eating soup in the middle of summer. My grandmother would be sweating through her hanbok, fanning herself with a paper fan in one hand, and somehow still slurping down a steaming bowl of samgyetang with the other.
It took me years to understand the logic. You fight heat with heat, and you cool down with things that are actually meant for hot weather, not just whatever’s in the fridge.
Busan does summer food differently than the rest of the country anyway. We’re a port city, we’re surrounded by the sea, and a lot of what ends up on the table here reflects that.
So if you’re visiting this summer, skip the convenience store ice cream for a minute and try some of what locals actually order when the humidity hits.
1. Milmyeon
This one is ours. Naengmyeon gets all the attention nationally, but milmyeon is the Busan version, made with wheat flour instead of buckwheat, and it has its own personality.
The story goes that it came out of necessity after the Korean War, when northern refugees settled in Busan and adapted their cold noodle recipes to whatever flour was available locally.
The noodles are a bit chewier, the broth tends to be a little sweeter and less icy than naengmyeon, and it usually comes with a hard-boiled egg, cucumber, and a stubborn amount of red chili paste that you have to mix in yourself.
There are old-school milmyeon spots all over the city, but the ones near Dongnae have been doing it for generations, and it shows.
2. Mulhoe
If you want to eat like someone who actually lives by the ocean, this is it.
Mulhoe is raw fish, usually flounder or rockfish, served cold in a spicy, slightly sweet broth with vegetables, ice, and sometimes a splash of soju mixed right in.
It sounds like a strange combination until you try it on a brutally hot day at the beach. Gijang, just up the coast from Haeundae, is famous for it, and a lot of locals will make a day trip out there specifically for a bowl.
It’s refreshing in a way that’s hard to explain until your face is buried in it.
3. Kongguksu
This is the quiet one on the list. Kongguksu is a cold noodle soup made with a thick, almost milky soybean broth, and it has a nutty, slightly bland flavor that grows on you fast.
It’s the kind of dish older Korean women order without a second thought and younger people sometimes have to be talked into.
Once you try it, though, you get why it’s stuck around. It’s filling without weighing you down, and the soy broth genuinely cools your body temperature in a way cold water never quite manages.
4. Patbingsu
Not exactly a hidden gem, I know, but it earns its spot. Shaved milk ice piled with sweet red beans, rice cakes, and condensed milk, sometimes with fruit or injeolmi powder on top depending on where you go.
The cafes around Gwangalli and Songjeong have gotten creative with it in the last few years, but honestly the simpler, old-fashioned versions at local bakeries hit just as hard.
Order one for the table. Everyone says they’ll just have a bite and then somehow the whole thing disappears.
5. Samgyetang
Back to my grandmother. Samgyetang is a whole young chicken stuffed with glutinous rice, garlic, jujube, and ginseng, simmered into a milky, restorative broth, and it’s traditionally eaten on the hottest days of the year, known as bok nal.
The idea is that your body loses so much energy fighting the heat that you need something rich and warming to replace it, rather than something cold that just shocks your system for a minute.
It sounds counterintuitive until you’ve sweated through a bowl on a 35-degree day and somehow felt better afterward. There’s a reason this one has survived for centuries.
None of these are particularly photogenic or built for a tourist menu. They’re just what people here actually eat when summer gets unbearable, which in Busan, is most of June through August.
Go find a spot with no English menu and an ahjumma who looks like she’s been making the same dish for thirty years.
That’s usually the right call.
