New here? This is the seventh article in the Survival Guide, our running story about one Ohio family learning Korean food from a standing start. You can begin at Part 1. The most useful background for this one is Episode 5, where Bob met his colleague's family, and Episode 6, the family's first Korean BBQ.
Recipes vary by restaurant and chain. When it matters, ask.
The thing nobody tells you about learning a food culture through your family is that your family is doing most of the work.
Bob Miller had figured this out somewhere over Indiana, at thirty thousand feet, in a middle seat, next to a colleague he had known for a little over a year.
Every Korean meal of his life so far had come with a support staff. Lily supplied the enthusiasm and the half-remembered facts. Linda read the room and made the server like them. Chloe absorbed a share of the attention simply by refusing to participate in anything. Ethan had not even been on the first trip, and when he finally came he arrived at Korea sideways, through a video game and a boy who had beaten him at it, and spent the evening watching a tabletop grill the way he watches a screen.
Four of them, then five. Whatever Bob got wrong at those tables, he got wrong inside a crowd.
There was no crowd on this trip. There was a two-day customer visit outside Chicago, a rental car, a hotel with a lobby that smelled like carpet shampoo, and Ban Chan-sol, who was forty-one, a mechanical engineer, and the only person Bob knew within four hundred miles.
They finished the second day of meetings at ten past six. In the parking lot, Chan-sol looked at his phone, then at Bob, with an expression Bob had learned to recognize over the past year and had privately started calling the offer.
"Do you like fried chicken?"
Bob, who is from Ohio, said what people from Ohio say to that question, which is a slightly offended yes.
"Okay," Chan-sol said. "Not that kind."
A Restaurant Named Hometown
The place was a Bonchon (본촌), which meant nothing to Bob and everything to Chan-sol. From the outside it looked like a hundred places he had walked past in a hundred cities. He had eaten in about eighty of them. Nothing about the front of it suggested that anything on the other side of the door was going to be new.
Inside there were screens, and on the screens there was a baseball game, and the room had arranged itself around both. Not restaurant loud. Bar loud, with a reason for it. Half the tables had a shared platter in the middle and people were reaching into them without looking down, because they were watching something.
Chan-sol ordered before they sat down. Two beers and something else, in one go, without opening the menu.
Bob noticed this and filed it away without understanding it, which is roughly how he has learned everything about Korean food.
💡 Bonchon means "my hometown"
The brand says so itself. It started in Busan in 2002, and its first American restaurant opened in 2006 in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Not Manhattan. A New Jersey suburb with a large Korean American community, because that is where the customers already were. Everything after that was spreading outward: there are well over a hundred locations in the US now, and several hundred more around the world. Korean fried chicken is not a trend that is coming. It arrived, quietly, while American food writing was busy with something else.
Twenty Minutes
Two minutes after they sat down the beers were on the table. A minute after that, so was a plate of greens with sesame dressing and, improbably, kimchi in it, which Bob had neither ordered nor seen anyone order.
"It takes a while," Chan-sol said, nodding at the empty middle of the table. "The chicken."
"How long is a while?"
"Twenty minutes. Maybe twenty-five." He pushed the greens toward Bob. "This is for that."
Bob did the thing he does when he is recalculating, which is nod slowly at the table. Twenty-five minutes is not a wait time for fried chicken in the American imagination. Fried chicken is the food you buy when you have run out of time. It sits under a heat lamp precisely so that you do not have to wait for it. The entire American fast food industry is, in some sense, an argument that chicken should be immediate.
"They start when you order," Chan-sol said. "Nothing is sitting there. And it goes in twice."
"Twice."
"Once to cook it. Then it comes out, it rests, and it goes back in." He turned his hand over, palm up, then down. He does this when he explains things. Bob has come to understand that Chan-sol's hands are load-bearing. "The second time is not for cooking. The chicken is already cooked. The second time is for the outside."
Bob, who has spent twenty years thinking about the outside of meat, sat up slightly.
"The first fry pushes the water out," Chan-sol said. "The second fry, there is no water left to fight. So the crust gets hard. Really hard. Then you can put sauce on it and it still stays hard. That is the whole trick."
Twenty years at a Weber kettle had taught Bob exactly one durable lesson, which is that moisture is the enemy of a crust and heat is the only thing that removes it. He had learned it slowly, at length, with a lid down. Somebody in Busan had solved the same problem by simply doing the entire operation twice.
"That is annoying," Bob said.
Chan-sol looked delighted.
💡 The table is never empty for twenty-five minutes
In Korea a chicken shop is a bar, and a bar does not sit you down in front of nothing. The beer comes out within a minute or two, because it is poured rather than cooked, and while the chicken is frying most places put something free in front of you to hold the gap: a bowl of popcorn, often dusted with curry powder, or puffed rice crackers, or a small salad. It is not a course and nobody announces it. It exists so that twenty-five minutes reads as the beginning of the evening instead of a wait. American branches of Korean chains are inconsistent about this, so if your table stays bare, order a starter along with the drinks. That is what a regular in Korea would have done before sitting down.
The Question Bob Got Wrong
The menu had a column of sauces on it, and Bob understood immediately that this was a decision, and that he was about to make it badly.
Soy garlic. Spicy. A red one called yangnyeom. And sitting above all of them, before the list of sauces even started, one with nothing on it at all.
"Which one," Bob said.
"Yes," Chan-sol said.
Bob waited.
"Both. You get both. Half and half." He said something in Korean, two syllables, and then said it again slower when he saw Bob's face. Ban-ban. "It just means half half. Everybody orders it. If you order only one you are making a mistake and also you will be sad in twenty minutes when you see the other one."
"Okay. Which two."
"Plain, and the red one."
Bob looked at him. Plain, on a menu with five sauces on it, sounded like what a person orders when he has given up.
"You have to taste it once with nothing on it," Chan-sol said. "Otherwise you will never find out what they actually did to it."
This is a small thing and it is the entire lesson of the evening. Bob had read the menu as a test with one right answer, which is how an anxious person reads a menu. Chan-sol had read it as a set of options that were designed from the beginning to be combined. Half the difficulty of a foreign menu is not the food. It is the assumption you bring to it about how choosing works.
💡 Ban-ban (반반), and what to put in your two halves
Ban-ban (반반) means half and half. It is the default order for two or more people, not a special request, and the oldest version of it is the one Chan-sol ordered: plain fried on one side, yangnyeom on the other. Yangnyeom (양념) just means seasoning, and the sauce is gochujang and gochugaru with starch syrup and garlic behind it, hot but not punishing, closer to a warm buzz than a burn. The plain half is not the boring half. It is the only place you can taste what the double frying did, and everything the sauce is sitting on. American chain menus add soy garlic, which is soy sauce, garlic and sugar brushed on so it lacquers rather than soaks; it is not spicy at all and it is the one that converts people. Ordering alone and cannot decide? Soy garlic. Two of you? Take the plain half.
The Radish
The chicken came, eventually, on a metal platter, and it did not look like American fried chicken. The pieces were smaller. The crust was thinner and lighter and slightly translucent in places, more like a shell than a coating. Half of it was pale gold and bare. Half was red and glossy.
Next to it, in a small plastic bowl, were cubes of white radish in clear liquid.
Bob picked one up with his chopsticks and looked at it.
"Chicken-mu," Chan-sol said. "Mu is radish. It is not a side dish. It is a tool."
"A tool."
"Eat two pieces of chicken and then eat one." He waited. Bob ate two pieces of chicken and then ate one.
The effect was immediate and slightly startling. The radish was cold, sweet, sharp with vinegar, and it went through the fat on his tongue like a squeegee across a windshield. Everything that had accumulated in the last ninety seconds simply left. The next piece of chicken tasted like the first one had.
"Oh," Bob said.
"Yes."
"That is a reset button."
"That is a reset button," Chan-sol agreed, and ate one.
American fried chicken comes with coleslaw, which is also cold and also acidic, and which Bob had eaten his whole life without ever once understanding that it was doing a job. Somebody had designed that pairing too. Nobody had ever said so out loud.
Chimaek
The beers had been on the table for twenty-five minutes before the chicken got anywhere near it. Bob had the order of that backward in his head, and it took him most of the evening to work out why it kept snagging on him. At home the drink is what they hand you to keep you occupied until the food comes. Here the drink had started the evening by itself, and the chicken had walked in on something already underway.
When the first bottle came he had reached for it and poured for Chan-sol first, settling his left hand under his right forearm without thinking about it. The pour did not wobble.
Chan-sol did not say anything about it. He received the glass with two hands, and there was a small pause that Bob chose not to examine.
"Chimaek," Chan-sol said, tapping his glass against Bob's. "Chi from chicken. Maek from maekju, beer. It is one word. There is no version of this where you do not have the beer."
Bob has been to a lot of restaurants where beer was available. He had never been to one where the beer was part of the name of the meal.
Later Bob would learn that chimaek is not really a dinner at all, in the way he was having it. In Korea it is a night food. It is what arrives at eleven o'clock at somebody's apartment in a plastic bag, what a stadium full of people eat during a baseball game, what two friends do after work when neither of them wants to go home yet. The reason the pieces are small and the reason there is a reset button in a plastic bowl are the same reason: this is food built to be eaten slowly, by people who are talking, for longer than a meal takes.
"In Korea the chicken place is the bar," Chan-sol said, when Bob asked why it was so loud in here. "It is not a restaurant that also sells beer. It is where you go to watch something. That is the same thing."
Bob looked at the screens again, and at a room full of people making a noise he had heard three weeks earlier, from a seat in the 300 level, while his son stood up on his chair. He had assumed at the time that the sound belonged to the arena.
Bob and Chan-sol sat in that room, in a city belonging to neither of them, for two hours and forty minutes.
The Brisket Guy Does the Math
At some point around the ninth piece Bob said, out of nowhere, "It's the same argument."
Chan-sol waited.
"With the galbi. And the brisket." Bob turned a piece over, looking at the crust. "I do sixteen hours and I get one thing. You do four days in a refrigerator and you get a different thing. This one is, what, ten minutes of frying?"
"Around that. In two parts."
"Ten minutes. But it's ten minutes twice, and the whole point is the part between, when it's out and it's resting." Bob put the piece down. "That's not cooking time. That's just waiting. You put a wait in the middle of the cooking on purpose."
He had said this before, about brisket, to anyone who would listen, at length, for two decades. He had simply never heard anybody else say it back to him in another language.
"Yes," Chan-sol said. "That is exactly it."
Bob has now had three experiences of this kind. His colleague's marinade, which was patience moved from the fire to the refrigerator. His first tabletop grill, where the fire was the one part of the cuisine that needed no translation. And now a piece of chicken that had been made crisp by being taken out of the oil and left alone for a minute.
It took him three encounters to say it the first time. It took him one dinner to say it now. He did not notice this. That is generally how it works.
Why He Picked a Chain
In the rental car, Bob asked the question that had been sitting under the whole evening.
"Is that the good one? Is there a better place?"
"Probably," Chan-sol said. "There is always a better place. There is a place in Albany Park I like more."
"So why didn't we go there?"
Chan-sol thought about it for long enough that Bob glanced over.
"Because you are not going to be in Chicago again," he said. "There is one outside Cleveland. Broadview Road, in Seven Hills."
He said it the way a person says an address he has looked up.
"If I take you to the place I like here, you have a nice night and then it is over. If I take you to this one, you can go back."
💡 The chicken got to Ohio before the groceries did
This family cannot reach a Korean supermarket without giving up most of a Saturday. The nearest H Mart is a three-hour drive, and there is no Koreatown in their county. But there is Korean fried chicken about an hour up the highway, in a strip on Broadview Road, because Korean restaurant chains have pushed into the American middle in a way Korean grocery chains have not. Bonchon alone runs well over a hundred American locations. If you live somewhere without a Korean neighborhood, the first genuinely Korean thing within driving distance is very likely to be fried chicken. That is worth knowing before you assume there is nothing near you.
Bob drove for a while.
The restaurant was called my hometown, and neither of them was anywhere near his, and a man Bob had known for a little over a year had spent the evening making sure Bob would be able to find his way back without him.
That is what it means to teach somebody a food. Not the meal. The address.
How is Korean fried chicken different from American fried chicken?
The crust is the whole difference. American fried chicken is usually a thick seasoned coating, often buttermilk-dredged, fried once, and it is meant to be eaten within a few minutes of coming out of the oil. Korean fried chicken uses a thin starch-based coating and goes into the fryer twice, which drives the water out and leaves a hard, glassy shell. That shell is what lets a wet sauce go on top without turning the whole thing soft. The pieces are also smaller, and the sauce is brushed or tossed on after frying rather than seasoned into the batter before.
Why does Korean fried chicken take twenty minutes?
Because nothing is sitting under a heat lamp. The frying starts when you order, and it happens in two passes with a rest in between, so fifteen to twenty-five minutes is normal rather than a sign that something has gone wrong. Order drinks and something small at the same time as the chicken. In Korea that gap is treated as the start of the evening, not as waiting.
Should I order soy garlic or spicy?
Order two, not one. Nearly every Korean chicken place will split an order down the middle, which in Korean is called ban-ban (반반), meaning half and half, and it is the default order for two people rather than a special request. The most Korean version of it is plain fried on one side and yangnyeom (양념), the red sweet-spicy sauce, on the other, because the bare half is the only place you can taste what the double frying actually did. If you are ordering alone and want the easiest start, soy garlic is sweet, salty, not spicy at all, and the better choice for children.
What is the pickled radish that comes with it?
Cubes of white radish in a sweet vinegar brine, called chicken-mu (치킨무). It is not a side dish in the banchan sense and it is not garnish. It is a palate reset, designed to cut the fat between pieces so the tenth piece tastes like the first. Eat one every two or three pieces. Most American branches of Korean chains include it with the chicken at no charge, along with or instead of coleslaw. Do not confuse it with danmuji (단무지), the bright yellow pickled radish cut into strips that comes with gimbap and jajangmyeon. Same vegetable, different pickle, different job.
What does chimaek mean?
Chimaek (치맥) is a compound of chi, from chicken, and maek, from maekju (맥주), meaning beer. It is one word in Korean because it is one thing: an evening built around fried chicken and beer, usually long, usually loud, usually with a game on. It is not a combo deal on a menu. If you would rather not drink, the same room runs on soda and the evening works the same way.
Next in the Survival Guide: November. Linda accepted an invitation back in June that the family has been quietly counting down to, and it involves eighty cabbages, a grandmother flying in from Korea, and two days that will change how this family thinks about kimchi.
Next in the Menu Deep Dives: miyeok-guk (미역국), the seaweed soup Koreans eat on their own birthdays, which the wellness press just discovered on a famous breakfast table and completely misread. What it is, and who the bowl is actually for.
And still to come: the full explanation of what Bob ate. Korean fried chicken, sauce by sauce.
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