"Korean fried chicken 'GAMI' is taking over Australia"
According to SBS Food section, a Korean fried chicken restaurant 'Gami' is taking over Australia.
Gami was founded by the four university friends from Kora, Jun Lee, Rio Yoon, Ayden Jung and Max Ji and has been grown to multi-million business.
In an interview with SBS, the four said, "Every Friday was Korea day. We'd have a Korean student gathering and we talked about starting a business together."
"A few years later, we were all in Melbourne and we were sitting in a pub nearby my old place and we started talking about it again. With two chefs among us, going into food made sense," explains Lee.
The first Gami opened in the suburb of Carnegie, in 2006. The focus was not on fried chicken yet; it offered all sorts of Korean dishes.
Korean fried chicken, or KFC, as it's often abbreviated, is indeed massive in South Korea. There's a Korean word for the combination of fried chicken and beer, chimaek. It's even reported that the number of fried chicken shops in South Korea outnumbers the number of McDonald's globally.
"Korean fried chicken started from American fried chicken, it came to us after the Korean War," explains Lee. "But the American crust is so thick, which we loved decades ago, but we started feeling it was a bit too greasy. Koreans started developing a thinner crust [that's] less oily."
It's this twice-fried thinner crust that differentiates Korean fried chicken. That, and the sauces used to coat the bird. "Koreans are naturally good sauce-makers, so we started marinating sauces to put on top of the chicken," says Lee.
In 2009, Gami took the leap and opened its first fried chicken and beer shop in the Melbourne CBD.
K-Food