If you visit Korea between July and August, you'll quickly notice two things: the heat is no joke, and Koreans have a whole cultural system built around surviving it. Two of the biggest players in that system are bingsu, the shaved ice dessert everyone lines up for, and Bok-nal, the three hottest days of summer when entire families sit down for a steaming bowl of samgyetang. Yes — eating hot soup on the hottest days of the year. It sounds backwards until you understand the logic behind it.
This post mixes background explanation with my own memories growing up around these traditions. I'll walk you through where bingsu actually came from, what Bok-nal really means and when it falls in 2026, why samgyetang became the go-to dish, and what summer in Korea actually feels like on the ground — heat, humidity, monsoon rains and all.
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| Injeolmi bingsu at Sulbing |
Bingsu: simple ice, complicated history
Ask most Koreans where bingsu comes from and you'll probably get a shrug — it's just always been there, the way ice cream trucks are always just there in some countries. But the actual history is a layered one, and it crosses both Korea and Japan.
The earliest documented version goes back to the Joseon Dynasty. Government officials had access to ice harvested from frozen rivers in winter and stored through the warmer months in underground stone ice houses called seokbinggo (석빙고) — some of which you can still visit today. Shaved ice with red bean paste was a luxury at the time, reserved for royalty and aristocrats, simply because producing and storing ice was so difficult. Officials would have the ice shaved and shared it among themselves, often topped with whatever fruit was available.
During Japan's colonial rule over Korea (1910–1945), the Japanese dessert kakigori — shaved ice doused in flavored syrup — was introduced and became commercially available in Korea. That's where the modern, machine-shaved version of the dessert really took off locally. But the two desserts went in different directions from there. In Japan today, kakigori has largely stayed close to its original form: ice and syrup, simple and minimal. In Korea, the dessert kept evolving and getting heartier — milk, sweet red beans, and eventually a long list of other toppings got added in, especially after the Korean War, when condensed milk and other new ingredients became available. That's the version that became patbingsu, and eventually just "bingsu" as most Koreans know it today: a loaded, shareable bowl rather than a simple icy drink.
- Classic patbingsu — shaved ice, sweet boiled red beans, condensed milk. The original, and still the most common.
- Injeolmi bingsu — milk-based shaved ice topped with chewy injeolmi rice cake, roasted soybean powder, and red beans. Became iconic largely thanks to the franchise Sulbing.
- Fruit bingsu — mango, strawberry, melon, etc. piled over milk ice, popular since the 2010s and the type most cafes push hardest in summer.
- Premium hotel bingsu — luxury versions using high-grade fruit (especially apple mango), often priced at tens of thousands of won per bowl.
That last category deserves its own paragraph, because it's become something of a summer media event in Korea. Every year, five-star hotels in Seoul roll out their seasonal bingsu menus, and every year, the prices make headlines. We're talking premium mango bingsu running well into the tens of thousands of won — sometimes close to the price of a nice dinner for two — for a bowl that, ingredient-wise, probably costs a fraction of that to make at home. And yet, the hotel lobbies are packed. Part of what you're paying for isn't really the ice and the fruit — it's the air-conditioned lounge, the plating, the photo opportunity, and honestly, the bragging rights of having eaten "that" bingsu this year. It's become its own little seasonal ritual for a certain crowd in Seoul, separate from the everyday bingsu most people actually eat.
The bingsu I grew up with was simple — shaved ice, sweet red bean on top, a splash of milk. That was basically the only version that existed back then. These days there's so much more variety, with all kinds of toppings layered on, and I genuinely like a lot of them. Injeolmi bingsu especially — the rice cake and roasted soybean powder give it this nutty, toasty flavor that I really love. It's not that I prefer the old version over the new ones; it's more that the basic red bean version is still what "bingsu" means to me first, even though my actual taste has expanded along with everyone else's.
My clearest memory isn't even eating bingsu at a shop — it's my mom making it at home. We were living in the U.S. in the 1980s, when Korean groceries were hard to come by, so she'd get her ingredients and even the ice-shaving machine from a Japanese supermarket nearby, since that was about the closest thing available at the time. She'd simmer the red beans on the stove herself, and I remember standing next to her stirring the pot because she put me to work. That's probably why this memory stuck with me so clearly — I wasn't just watching, I was part of making it.
As for the hotel bingsu prices — I'm not saying people should never buy it. Making bingsu at home is obviously the cheaper route, sure, but that's true of most desserts; nobody expects people to make everything from scratch. My issue is more with how steep some of those premium hotel prices have gotten, especially for something where the ingredient cost is nowhere close to the price tag. I get that part of what you're paying for is the air-conditioned lobby and the whole experience, and that's a fair trade for some people. I just personally don't feel like that particular bowl is worth tens of thousands of won to me.
What is Bok-nal, and why does it matter so much?
If bingsu is how Koreans cool down, Bok-nal (복날) is the opposite strategy entirely — and it's one of the more interesting bits of Korean food culture for visitors to understand, because it runs counter to almost every Western instinct about hot weather.
Bok-nal refers to three specific days scattered across midsummer: Chobok (초복, "early bok"), Jungbok (중복, "middle bok"), and Malbok (말복, "late bok"). Together they're called Sambok (삼복), and they mark what's traditionally considered the hottest stretch of the Korean year. The three days fall within a roughly month-long window from mid-July to mid-August, and are calculated using a combination of the solar terms Ha-ji (summer solstice) and Ip-chu (start of autumn) along with the traditional 10-day "Gyeong-il" cycle from the Korean calendar system — which is why the exact dates shift every year rather than landing on a fixed date.
For 2026, the dates are:
- Chobok (초복) — July 15 (Wednesday)
- Jungbok (중복) — July 25 (Saturday)
- Malbok (말복) — August 14 (Friday)
Notice the gap between Jungbok and Malbok is 20 days instead of the usual 10. This happens in years when the gap between the solar terms is wide enough to fit an extra 10-day cycle, and it's called wol-bok (월복) — and 2026 is one of those years. Traditionally that's read as a sign the hot weather will drag on a little longer than usual, which lines up with what most people in Korea have been feeling about recent summers anyway. If you're planning to eat samgyetang on Malbok, book your table at least a few days ahead — popular restaurants get packed solid on these dates.
Why hot soup on the hottest days? This is the part that confuses a lot of visitors, and honestly it's one of those Korean ideas that sounds illogical until it clicks. The concept is called iyeolchiyeol (이열치열) — roughly, "fight heat with heat." The underlying belief is that eating hot soup raises your body temperature on purpose, and once you've sweated it out, your body actually cools down and the external heat feels less overwhelming afterward. There's also a more practical, less mystical layer to it: in eras when meat wasn't a major part of the everyday Korean diet, nutrient-dense foods including meat were seen as necessary to keep people's strength up through the most physically draining part of summer — particularly for farmers, since Bok-nal lands right in the middle of the rice-growing season when the labor demands are highest.
"Fight heat with heat" never made sense to me growing up. I'm already dying of heat, why would anyone tell me to make myself hotter on purpose? Iyeolchiyeol (이열치열) felt like one of those adult sayings that sounded wise but didn't actually hold up.
It wasn't until I got older that I really felt what it meant. You eat the hot soup, you sweat through it, and then for a few minutes afterward, sitting still, your body genuinely cools down — there's this strange dip where you actually feel more comfortable than you did before eating. I still can't fully explain it scientifically, but I've felt it enough times now that I get why the saying stuck around for generations.
Samgyetang: the dish that survived everything
Samgyetang (삼계탕) — a whole young chicken stuffed with glutinous rice, garlic, jujube, and ginseng, then simmered until the meat falls off the bone — is the single most associated dish with Bok-nal today. But it wasn't always the only option, and understanding what it replaced tells you something about how much Korean food culture has shifted in just the last couple of generations.
| Dish | Status today |
|---|---|
| Samgyetang (ginseng chicken soup) | The dominant choice — most popular by far |
| Jang-eo gui (grilled eel) | Popular alternative, especially for stamina |
| Yukgaejang (spicy beef soup) | Common modern substitute for bosintang |
| Heuk-yeomso (black goat) / duck | Regional / niche favorites |
| Bosintang (dog meat soup) | Sharply declining; soon to be illegal nationwide |
That last row is worth explaining properly, since it's a topic that comes up a lot when foreigners ask about Korean food culture, and it's also genuinely changing in real time. Dog meat soup, called bosintang, does have a long history tied to Bok-nal — but it was never something the majority of Koreans actually ate, even at its peak. A 2020 survey found that 84% of South Koreans had never eaten dog meat and had no plans to in the future, and the practice has been declining sharply for years. By 2019, fewer than 100 restaurants in the entire Seoul metro area — out of more than 520,000 restaurants total — were still serving it. That decline is now backed by law. In January 2024, South Korea's National Assembly passed legislation criminalizing the breeding, slaughtering, and sale of dogs for food, with the law taking full effect in 2027 after a three-year transition period for farmers and business owners to exit the industry. Practically speaking, this means bosintang is already extremely rare to encounter, and by the time you're reading this, it will be on its way to disappearing entirely as a legal food item in Korea.
I don't eat bosintang myself, and I never have. But I want to push back a little on how this topic usually gets framed when Western media covers it, because I think it misses something.
For people who grew up eating it, the dogs raised specifically for food were never thought of as pets — they were raised as livestock from the start, the same way cows and pigs are. So in their mind, it wasn't "eating a pet," it was eating an animal that was never treated as a companion animal in the first place. That's not me defending the industry itself, especially given how those animals were often raised — that part is genuinely hard to justify. But the framing that Koreans who ate it were simply being "uncivilized" always struck me as a bit unfair, and a bit ignorant of how food culture works everywhere. Every culture has eaten something another culture finds shocking. Anyway — it's becoming a moot point going forward, since the law is phasing it out completely by 2027.
Korea's summer heat is getting genuinely extreme
If you're planning a trip for July or August, it's worth setting your expectations correctly, because Korean summers have intensified noticeably in recent years. This isn't just anecdotal — in 2024, Korea recorded 30.1 days of heatwaves, the second-highest total in its recorded history, while tropical nights — nights that never cool below 25°C — reached an unprecedented 24.5 days. Seoul recorded its first-ever June tropical night since 1907 back in 2022, and that pattern has continued in the years since. Combined with stories of road surfaces buckling and train tracks needing inspection in extreme heat — which do happen during the worst stretches — it's easy to see why Bok-nal traditions around staying cool (or, paradoxically, eating hot soup) have remained so culturally relevant rather than fading away.
Layered on top of the heat is jangma (장마), Korea's monsoon season. Jangma typically runs from late June through late July, lasting somewhere between 30 and 50 days depending on the year, and is caused by the collision of the North Pacific high-pressure system with the continental high-pressure system over Asia. July is usually the wettest month in the country, and umbrellas become a near-daily necessity once the front settles in. It's during this stretch that low-lying neighborhoods and semi-basement (banjiha) homes have historically been most vulnerable to flooding — a problem that made international headlines a few summers back and that local authorities have been working to address since. Interestingly, recent years have shown that jangma is becoming less predictable as a fixed "season" in the traditional sense — in 2025, for instance, the rainy season shifted unusually far north and ended early, leaving Seoul under a heatwave with little rainfall through early July instead of the typically wet conditions. Meteorologists in Korea have even begun publicly debating how to redefine the term jangma altogether to reflect this growing unpredictability.
For visitors, this all translates into a few practical habits worth picking up fast: duck into a cafe or convenience store when the heat peaks (Koreans do this constantly, and it's completely normal), carry a small portable fan or umbrella, and don't be surprised when locals casually order hot soup on the hottest day of your trip — now you'll know exactly why.
Where to actually find these things as a visitor
If you want to try the real thing rather than a tourist-trap version, a few tips. For bingsu, neighborhood cafes and dedicated dessert shops generally offer better value and freshness than hotel lobbies — though if you want the "experience" version once, a hotel bingsu is a fun (expensive) one-time thing to try, especially if you're already exploring an area like Seongsu-dong or another cafe-heavy neighborhood. For samgyetang, look for restaurants that have been operating for decades — Korea has several legendary, generations-old samgyetang spots in Seoul that get especially busy on Bok-nal itself, so reservations matter. If your trip happens to land on one of the 2026 Bok-nal dates, consider it an opportunity rather than an inconvenience — joining a samgyetang restaurant packed with regulars on Malbok is a genuinely good way to experience a slice of everyday Korean life that most tourist itineraries skip entirely. And if you're navigating Seoul during the rainy season more broadly, it pairs well with knowing Seoul Metro routes, since staying mobile underground is one of the easiest ways to dodge sudden downpours.
Korean summer isn't subtle. Between the heat, the humidity, the sudden monsoon downpours, and the cultural rituals built specifically to deal with all of it, it's a season that shapes daily life here more than people from milder climates might expect. But there's something I genuinely like about it too — the way a bowl of bingsu becomes an actual event with friends, the way Bok-nal turns into an excuse for families to sit down together over soup, the way the whole country seems to collectively brace for and then push through the worst weeks together. It's intense, but it's also one of the more communal, tradition-rich seasons Korea has to offer if you're willing to embrace it rather than just endure it.