The Death That Reframed Korean Fried Chicken: Inside the Invention of Yangnyeom Sauce

The Death That Reframed a Dish

On January 8, 2026, the family of Yoon Jong-gye disclosed that he had died on December 30, 2025, at his home in Cheongdo County, North Gyeongsang Province, following complications from diabetes and a heart attack. He was 74. Kyunghyang Shinmun, News1, Munhwa Ilbo, and Seoul Shinmun all ran obituaries within days of each other, and each one centered on the same claim: that Yoon was the man credited with inventing yangnyeom, the sweet-spicy sauced style that became Korean fried chicken’s signature identity. For American readers who’ve eaten Korean fried chicken at a strip-mall Bonchon or a food-hall stall, the sauce is usually just the point of the dish. Yoon’s death is why, in early 2026, that sauce suddenly has a name and a life story attached to it.

From Battlefield to Bar Snack: How Fried Chicken Reached Korea

Fried chicken itself didn’t originate in Korea, and the route it took to get there has little to do with the American South. Food historians commonly trace the dish’s spread through Korea to the period after the 1953 armistice, when American military presence brought commissary access and black-market food networks that put fried chicken in front of Koreans for the first time — though this origin narrative isn’t universally settled among historians. That’s a genuinely different starting point than the US version of fried chicken, which has roots going back well before the 20th century. In Korea, it’s a mid-century import that took on its own identity within a few decades, and Yoon’s sauce is the biggest reason why.

The Sauce That Changed Everything: Corn Syrup, Gochugaru, and Brining

Around 1980, at his shop in Daegu, Yoon introduced what Korean press describes as the country’s first red-pepper-and-corn-syrup seasoning sauce, paired with a brining pretreatment applied to the chicken before frying. That combination — a savory-sweet-spicy glaze layered onto pre-brined meat — is the specific thing Korean obituary coverage credits as the actual invention of yangnyeom chicken. Five years later, in August 1985, he turned it into a business: a shop in Hyomok-dong, Daegu, originally named Gyeseong Tongdak. He signed a broiler-chicken supply contract with Harim in October 1988 and incorporated the company in December 1989 as Mexican Inc. — the business that became known as the Maxican Chicken brand. The name has no connection to the country of Mexico; it comes from the sauce’s “spicy, sour, sweet” character.

Analysis: The closest US comparison is Buffalo wings, and it’s a useful comparison mainly because of how differently the two food cultures solved the same basic problem. Buffalo wings are fried once, then tossed in a butter-and-cayenne hot sauce right before serving — wet, drippy, meant to be eaten fast. Yangnyeom chicken is brined first, fried twice, then glazed with a sticky corn-syrup-and-gochugaru sauce that behaves more like a lacquer than a toss sauce. If you’ve had both, that’s the tell: Buffalo wings soak the skin, yangnyeom chicken stays crisp underneath the glaze.

Chicken-mu: The Side Dish Born With the Sauce

The sauce wasn’t the only thing Yoon claimed credit for. In a 2020 interview, he said he’d produced Korea’s first chicken-brand television commercial, and that he had introduced chicken-mu — the cubed, pickled daikon radish now served alongside nearly every order of Korean fried chicken — before he’d even finished perfecting the yangnyeom sauce itself. That attribution was repeated across his obituary coverage in January 2026. It’s a small detail, but it says something about how Yoon worked: the sauce, the side dish, and the marketing all seem to have come together as one package, rather than the sauce arriving first and everything else following later.

Double-Fried: The Technique That Made It a Different Category

The double fry is the part of Korean fried chicken that has nothing to do with any single inventor and everything to do with why the category reads as distinct on a menu. The chicken is fried once to cook the meat through, rested, then fried a second time to drive excess moisture out of the skin. The result is a noticeably thinner, crispier crust than most single-fried American styles produce.

Analysis: That’s the mechanical reason Korean fried chicken holds up to being delivered, boxed, or eaten an hour after it’s cooked without turning soggy — a genuinely useful property a lot of US diners notice before they could explain why. It’s also the real technical basis for calling this “a different category” rather than just a different sauce on the same fried chicken.

Korean Fried Chicken Crosses the Pacific

The clearest evidence that this category has staying power in the US market isn’t a trend piece — it’s store counts. Bonchon, one of the largest Korean fried chicken chains, opened its 150th US restaurant in Jonesboro, Arkansas in February 2025, continuing an expansion that has put Korean fried chicken in markets well outside the coastal cities where it first showed up in the US.

Analysis: Part of what’s made that expansion easier is that the US already has infrastructure for a fried-chicken-and-sauce chain to slot into — strip malls and food-court real estate built out over decades by chains like Buffalo Wild Wings. Korean fried chicken brands aren’t introducing Americans to the concept of sauced fried chicken; they’re offering a different version of something the market already has habits and real estate for. It’s worth knowing, too, that July 29 is National Chicken Wing Day in the US, widely reported (though not confirmable through a surviving municipal record) as tracing back to a 1977 proclamation by then-Buffalo mayor Stanley Makowski. It’s a ready-made marketing date that Korean fried chicken chains didn’t have to invent.

The Legacy Yoon Leaves Behind

At its peak, Maxican Chicken grew to roughly 1,700 franchise outlets across Korea before winding down around 2003. The brand didn’t disappear entirely — Harim group later acquired it and folded it into Harim Yutong in 2024, more than two decades after Yoon had stopped actively running it.

Analysis: What Yoon doesn’t appear to have done, based on the available record, is lock down “yangnyeom chicken” as a protected term the way a company might trademark a specific brand name. That’s almost certainly why the style spread the way it did — every major Korean fried chicken chain operating today, including the ones now expanding across the US, uses some version of the sauce Yoon is credited with inventing in 1980, without paying him or his company for it. He got the obituary and the credit; the category itself became public domain. That’s the actual answer to why one man’s fingerprints can be all over a menu item that shows up, uncredited, on a hundred different menus: food categories, unlike brand names, aren’t something a court would have ever let one inventor keep to himself.