Kimchi is a Korean staple, but fried chicken may be South Korea's most revered snack, with some calling it "Chineunim" (치느님)—a combination of "chicken" with the Korean word for God (Haneunim 하느님).
In 2015 the country boasted some 36,000 fried chicken businesses, according to media estimates based on data from Korea Statistics, a government agency. A study by the Korea Research Institute for Human Settlement (KRIHS), a state-funded think tank, sees the figure as being much higher: it says that since 2005 the number of fried chicken outlets has remained fairly constant, at 85,000 over more, with only slight fluctuation from year to year.
If we believe the true number is somewhere in the middle, that's still about 60,000, equating to one fried chicken place for every 867 people in a country of some 52 million.