Kongguksu in a steel bowl, the noodles lifted clear of the thick white soybean broth with chopsticks.

Kongguksu Is Only Sold in Summer. The Salt or Sugar Fight Never Ends.

ByMK August 5, 2026September 2, 2026

A few summers ago I ate kongguksu with a coworker from Gwangju. Before touching her noodles, she put two spoons of sugar into the bowl. I thought she was making a mistake. She looked at my salt and thought the same about me.

We did not fight. But the table was quiet for a while.

What kongguksu is

Kongguksu means bean noodle soup. It is a cold dish. Wheat noodles sit in a thick white broth made from ground soybeans, with ice floating on top. Usually there is sliced cucumber, some sesame seeds, sometimes half a boiled egg.

The broth itself tastes like almost nothing. Not sweet, not salty, not spicy. Just beans. Nutty and plain. You season it yourself at the table.

That is where the problem starts.

A steel bowl of kongguksu: wheat noodles under a thick, pale soybean broth, with a plate of kimchi beside it.

Why you can only eat it in summer

Most restaurants sell kongguksu only from around June to August. The broth is freshly ground soybeans, and it goes bad fast, so shops make it every day in season and stop when the weather cools. Also nobody wants an ice-cold bean soup in January.

So it stays a summer food. When it disappears from the menu boards, you know summer is ending.

Salt or sugar

Most of Korea puts salt in kongguksu. But Jeolla province, especially Gwangju, puts sugar. For them, sweet bean broth is the normal taste from childhood. For everyone else, it sounds like putting sugar in soup.

People from Gwangju living in Seoul ask for sugar and sometimes the restaurant does not have any on the table. Every summer this argument comes back on the internet. Long threads. Strong words. Nobody has ever changed sides.

My coworker told me the sweet version tastes like summer at her grandmother’s house. I still use salt. We are both right, probably.

The self-serve station at a kongguksu restaurant, with jars of sugar on one tray and jars of salt on the next.

The texture is the whole game

With kongguksu, the thickness of the broth decides everything. Too thin and it tastes like water with a memory of beans. Too thick and it is like eating cold porridge. The noodles cannot move.

The famous shops are famous because they found the middle point, with a deep nutty flavor. In Seoul, the most known one is Jinju Hoegwan near City Hall station. It has made kongguksu for more than 50 years. At lunch time in July there is a line outside in the heat, which is a strange thing to do for a cold soup. A bowl there is around 16,000 won now, and the price goes up almost every year.