Royal Lane is the spine of Dallas's original Koreatown, and No.1 Plus Chicken is the room the record keeps electing as its fried-chicken standard. The craft here is Korean double-fry: fat rendered out of the skin, a thin crust that sets like glass, and a finish in yangnyeom sauce that balances sweet heat against garlic without drowning the bird.
The format is chimaek, chicken with beer, and the small room fills accordingly on weekend nights. The move in the record is a half-and-half order, yangnyeom against soy garlic, with the pickled radish cubes doing palate-reset duty between pieces. Takeout runs heavy because the double-fry holds its crunch in the box, which is the entire point of the technique.
Reviews occasionally test the price against the Southern counters across town, and the comparison misses. This is a different craft with a different labor bill, and judged inside its own category, the record gives the Royal Lane operation the rank it has held for years: the benchmark Korean bird in Dallas proper.
