24-hour pork soup near Kyungsung Univ, Busan, at 1am: Geumsu Dwaeji

One afternoon, today's discovery is Geumsu Dwaeji Gukbap near Kyungsung University, open 24 hours.

Location and hours of Geumsu Dwaeji Gukbap Gyeongseong-Pukyongdae Branch

• Address: 12 Suyeong-ro 346beon-gil, Nam-gu, Busan, South Korea, 1st floor
• Hours: Open 24 hours

What's the inside of the restaurant like

The interior is fairly spacious, seating around 40 people. It's the standard pork-soup-restaurant setup. There's no pork smell and the floor isn't slippery — you can tell they take cleanliness seriously.

Unlimited rice, rice cookers running all day

They seem to really care about freshness, right down to the rice. Since rice refills are unlimited, one of their two rice cookers is always cooking. They say they always serve rice cooked within the last two hours, so those cookers must stay busy all day long.

Lately, plenty of restaurants just microwave instant rice packets and dump them into a bowl — never mind that the rice tastes bland to begin with. But not here! Geumsu Dwaeji Gukbap serves freshly cooked, hot rice straight from the cooker, and unlimited too!

Menu and self-serve bar

The soup menu includes pork soup, sundae gukbap (blood sausage soup), intestine gukbap, mixed gukbap, pork jowl gukbap, and boiled pork rice sets. For drinking snacks, there's also boiled pork and hot pot.

Kimchi and vegetables to go with your meal are ready at the self-serve bar, so help yourself freely — and the noodles are unlimited too, so eat your fill.

Jipyeong makgeolli (rice wine) is available in different sizes. Baby chairs are provided too.

The basic table setting

Once you order, they bring out the basic side dishes. Just like the sign they proudly hung on the wall promises, none of the vegetables are wilted — even a single clove of garlic is fresh.

The scene at a university-area soup restaurant at 1am

The soup I ordered arrives. Since COVID, all the 24-hour restaurants basically disappeared, but these days you're starting to see them pop back up one by one. Being a university area, people who've had a drink late at night and people coming for a late-night snack pour in and out in waves — it feels like early-evening restaurant traffic. We visited at 1am.

How's the pork soup

A soup like this fails instantly if it has a pork smell. But wow, one spoonful in and there's absolutely no pork smell — just hot, milky-white broth going down smoothly, sip after sip. I load it up with chives and even add some kkakdugi (radish kimchi) brine to eat it properly.

While pouring in the kkakdugi brine, a bunch of the radish kimchi itself plops right in. Fishing that out to eat gives it another distinct flavor.

The yellow thin noodles (somyeon) are still moist, not dried out at all 🌿 — they must have been boiled not long ago.

Rice refill, then a broth refill too

I polished off the first bowl of rice and scooped a new one — the rice has this glossy sheen that's a dead giveaway of freshly cooked rice. Eating rice straight from the cooker, it was genuinely delicious. It's been a long time since I've eaten at a restaurant where the rice itself was this good.

I basically inhaled the broth, so I got one more refill — they boiled it up hot in a pot and poured it straight into the stone bowl. Boss! Two bowls of broth, two bowls of rice! I hadn't eaten dinner that day, and thanks to such warm generosity, I left completely full and satisfied.

Good for days like this

If you've skipped dinner after a late night at work, there's no rice left at home, and you're desperate for a proper hot bowl of rice, head to Geumsu Dwaeji Gukbap, wide open 24 hours, and let a warm bowl of soup comfort your exhausting day. They say pork soup is the soul food of Busan people — and even I, once a vegetarian, now find comfort in a bowl of dwaeji gukbap.

This was Geumsu Dwaeji Gukbap Gyeongseong-Pukyongdae Branch, open 24 hours, overflowing with freshly cooked rice and warm hospitality.