The best dish to combat the heat? Ice-cold Korean noodles.

Even before I started writing about food professionally, friends and loved ones turned to me for meal recommendations. Chalk it up to my obsessive research for the finest basics, such as burgers and sandwiches, to my mental Rolodex of offbeat locales such as grocery store food courts and eateries tucked in the bowels of industrial parks.

I say this to buy your faith and trust, because as temperatures rise, one dish constantly floats to the top of my mind but is summarily rejected by nearly everyone I hold dear to my heart: mul naengmyeon — Korean noodle soup served ice-cold.

Stick with me.

It’s very humble in nature but can be a bit confounding if you’ve never dug in. Restaurants across the region will often present you with a metal mixing bowl. Inside, you’ll find a few ingredients: a strip or two of sliced beef brisket, half a hard-boiled egg, cucumbers cut into matchsticks, razor-thin slices of pickled daikon radish (and sometimes Asian pear) and long strands of buckwheat noodles.

These all swim in a concoction of the beef’s cooking liquid and dongchimi, the sweet, tangy brine from the radish and pear. A bed of shaved ice buoys it all and provides a delightful chill.

Mul naengmyeon is often accompanied by small bottles of white vinegar and a mustard blend on the side to add zip as you see fit. I prefer light dashes of each to let the harmony of sweet, savory and tangy shine through.

When it arrives at your table, you’ll also be asked whether you’d like the thick pile of noodles to be cut with scissors. This question stirs debate among purists, many of whom vehemently oppose snipping them in half.

I have lately fallen in line with leaving them untouched, but for anyone unsure, the noodles can be slippery and seem never-ending as you slurp. A dear friend and frequent dining companion, who got his noodles cut, once questioned me after a meal: “Were you trying to kill me by thinking about not cutting those?”

The dish has roots dating to the 19th century in modern-day North Korea. It has been a subject of fascination even in its homeland. You can find an entertaining two-part documentary on Netflix, “Korean Cold Noodle Rhapsody,” in which experts and enthusiasts note the strangeness that a perfect rendition of mul naengmyeon, also called Pyongyang naengmyeon, effectively tastes like nothing because of the clarity of the broth.

David Chang, a Korean American celebrity chef, has expressed his own love of the dish dating to his childhood summers spent golfing in this region’s heat.

In the U.S., you can find variants of the dish such as bibim naengmyeon, which is the same dish with a healthy dollop of gochujang, a red chili paste, blended with other spices. But here are three restaurants across the capital region that are serving the finest bowls of mul naengmyeon. Give it a shot next time you’re sweating from just walking outside.

Gah Rham

5027 Garrett Ave., Beltsville

Beltsville is home to a few of Prince George’s County’s finest Korean restaurants. Gah Rham neighbors a few other fine eateries in a nondescript strip mall, including Da Rae Won, which makes standout Chinese-influenced Korean cuisine, and Manila Mart, a one-stop shop for delectable Filipino food.

Most come here for Korean barbecue but dig into the menu for a pleasingly hearty bowl of mul naengmyeon. This is one of the milder preparations around, likely because some voracious eaters pair rich cuts of grilled-in-front-of-you bulgogi and brisket with a bowl. But the noodles hold up on their own, with a spread of banchan, the small sides that accompany most Korean dishes, which included pickled cucumber, kimchi and fish cakes on a recent visit.

Myoung Dong

1114B Baltimore Ave., Beltsville

Myoung Dong sits down the road from Gah Rham and feels like you’re stepping into your grandmother’s dining room. The cozy spot has a sharper focus on noodle dishes, including one for bolder eaters: hway naeng myun, a variant of the cold noodle dish that includes raw stingray and a scorching chili paste.

The portion at Myoung Dong is more modest than others and was served in a plastic bowl with minimal ice on a recent visit. But that allowed the broth to shine through with crispness. Instead of the typical mustard paste, I was given a small bottle of pure mustard oil to dash into the bowl that flared up my sinuses in a wonderful way.

Mahdang Korean Restaurant

2300 Wilkins Ave., Rockville

If you can find parking alongside the small sea of cars at the neighboring auto shop, this Rockville restaurant has some of the finest Korean food around. Even on a day that reached 90 degrees, other diners on a recent lunchtime visit were digging into small cauldrons of soondubu jjigae, a soft tofu stew.

But turn toward the mul naengmyeon, which comes with a generous spread of banchan. Mahdang had the most consistent slices of brisket among these spots, with just enough tenderness to balance the chewy strands of buckwheat noodles. The bowl was filled with chunks of shaved ice, which provided a consistent chill with every bite and made it all the more refreshing when I slurped up every last drop.

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