It’s dinnertime on a Saturday and a digital banner above the counter at Los Angeles’ Kyochon Chicken states in Korean that fried chicken will take approximately 40 minutes to make. A few customers squat down in front of the cramped, fast food-style restaurant, eagerly waiting for their orders.

My companions and I are prepared. Ever since New York Times food writer Julia Moskin explored the buzz over the new KFC — Korean fried chicken, that is — a few months ago, the craze has spread beyond the Big Apple to the West Coast. Food posting sites warned that getting a taste of what Moskin described as “crunchy, spicy, perfectly non-greasy chicken” wouldn’t be easy. Luckily, we called ahead.

These aren’t the fluffy, battered drumsticks and thighs that come in a bucket, explains Cicely Wedgeworth, editor of online food digest ChowNews, who ventured to the same Kyochon location shortly after it first opened in May. Despite waiting two hours for an order of the original and the spicy wings, she left full, happy and excited to share her findings.   

“I usually have an aversion to fried chicken and its flabby, nasty skin,” Wedgeworth says. “This chicken is perfectly crisp. It has this addicting flavor. It’s so tasty.” 

Korean fried chicken first hatched in New York about a year ago. In the Flushing neighborhood of Queens, home to a thriving Asian restaurant district, there are four joints on the same street and block: Kyochon Chicken, Kyedong Chicken, Bon Chon Chicken and Cheogajip Chicken (cheogajip translates as “mother-in-law’s home”). All have bright, cartoon-y signs, lengthy wait times, and freshly made fried chicken pieces ready to be packaged in red, orange or yellow cardboard to-go carriers. (You can also dine in, but seating is often limited.)  

“Ours is very crispy on the outside and not too buttery,” says Raymond Cho, manager of Flushing’s Bon Chon Chicken. “We get the sauce from Korea. We don’t dip the chicken in sauce; we brush it. It’s a new way of cooking.”

Sang Moon, company spokesman for Flushing’s Cheogajip Chicken, says that Cheogajip uses only fresh chickens, which are delivered daily and pressure-cooked to order.

The tasty trend emerged in Korea in the early ‘90s, not long after Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants began cropping up throughout the country. Kyochon, founded in 1991, is said to have developed the Korean chicken frying technique, a multi-step process much different than the one poultry-loving Americans have followed for generations.

With American-style fried chicken, to get that crumbly brown crust, large pieces of chicken are soaked in a breading mixture. But after that, the process gets tricky. Moskin explained the common frying dilemma: “Too often, the flesh is still raw when the crust is cooked, or the skin never cooks all the way through, leaving a flabby layer of skin between the meat and the crust,” she wrote in her February food feature.