Pizza Never Sleeps: Korean pizza in Mapo-gu
Love it or hate it, Korean pizza can be a controversy.
I’ve only tried Korean pizza once in Vancouver, and it was at Pizza Maru downtown. While it was not bad, I wanted to try for myself what Korean pizza is really like in actual South Korea. So for one of our dinners, we decided to seek out a nearby pizza restaurant that offers Korean pizza and not Italian pizza.
Recommended: Read my review of Korean pizza joint, Pizza Maru in downtown Vancouver.
We ended up finding a place called Pizza Never Sleeps in the Mapo-gu area, which is close enough for us to walk to from our hotel in Hongdae.
The vibe
Pizza Never Sleeps was located on the 4th floor of a building so you will need to take an elevator to access the restaurant (we tried taking the stairs but it was blocked by boxes).
The interior of Pizza Never Sleeps has a bit of a dark grungy vibe. The walls are black and there’s a lot of cement/industrial elements like the tables and chairs. However, they also have a huge chandelier in the middle of the dining area, which looked kind of out of place.
We were seated at a small window table for 2 but I did notice the windows were quite dirty so the view of the streets was kind of blurred 😅.
Food review of Pizza Never Sleeps
Here is everything we ordered for 2 people. All prices are converted from 1000:1 KRW:CAD and rounded to the nearest dollar.
Honey garlic sticks ($14)
I don’t know why it is labeled as honey garlic sticks on the menu because this item is literally chicken drumsticks.
For $14, you actually get quite an amount of drumsticks and it looked and smelled really good. The skin on the chicken looked crispy and it was coated in a thin layer of honey garlic sauce. The chicken drumsticks were a little hot to eat but gave off a “freshly made” impression.
Corn and potato pizza (half & half – $29)
We chose to do a half & half pizza, which means we can choose 2 different toppings. In the end, we chose 2 toppings we thought would be very “Korean” – corn and potato. The regular corn pizza is $27 and the regular potato pizza is $26.
We were thinking that the corn and potato toppings are more “Korean” because we find that Korean pizza is usually on the sweeter side, so they will use corn and sweet potatoes to offer a sweet and savory flavour combo.
What arrived actually made me laugh 😂. Again, we were expecting something like sweet potato, but what we got was a mountain of literal french fries on top of half of our pizza.
The corn side was more subtle, with bits of corn hidden under the cheese layer. Unfortunately for me, there were also big little balls of cream cheese and I hate cream cheese.
All in all, I have to say I did not like the pizza we ordered. I ended up removing the balls of cream cheese from one side, which left me with just an empty pizza and some nice bites of sweet corn. On the other side I just picked and ate the fries alone. I found eating the fries with the pizza to be an abomination and it also would fall off the pizza slice too.
Final thoughts
Loewe’s rating: ⭐️⭐️
Welp I don’t know what to tell you all except that I am hesitant to try future Korean pizza spots. I think I will still like a corn or sweet potato pizza, but generally speaking I do prefer the classic savoury pizzas. I also usually prefer thin crust pizza and I find a lot of Korean pizza use thick crust.
I think Pizza Never Sleep doesn’t necessarily make bad pizzas, but I think the toppings are just a little wack. The potatoes on the pizza really don’t do it for me – they should change the potato topping to some other form of potato.
Out of all the places we ate at during our trip to South Korea, I would rank this pizza meal the lowest. The chicken was good though 🙂.
Recommended: Read about my first few days in Seoul in my travel recap blog post.
Sincerely, Loewe