bb.q Chicken on State Street: Korean Fried Chicken Joins South Salt Lake's K-Town

For about a year now, South Salt Lake's stretch of State Street between 3000 and 4000 South has quietly become one of the densest concentrations of Korean food in the entire Wasatch Front. Baek Ri Hyang on the corner, K-Recipe a block down, the older Korean BBQ houses, the mom-and-pop banchan markets — the area has the makings of a small K-Town in the way Sandy and Murray don't. The most recent addition to the corridor: bb.q Chicken, opened at 3490 S State St with 367 reviews and a 4.5-star rating already on the board.

I'll lead with the part I usually try to bury. This is a franchise. Salt & Seek doesn't usually write about franchises. The Salt & Seek standard is independent operations with owner stories you can verify. So why this one? Because the Korean fried chicken category in Salt Lake has been thin for years, the South Salt Lake location is one of the first serious bb.q openings in the Mountain West, and the food — by the local critics who've been in the dining room — is the real thing.

The Brand, Briefly

bb.q stands for 'Best of the Best Quality.' The parent company is the Genesis BBQ Group, founded in Korea in 1995, and it's grown into the largest Korean fried chicken franchise on earth — somewhere north of 3,500 locations across forty-some countries. The brand's defining culinary move is frying in olive oil rather than vegetable shortening, which is the technique-level decision that gives bb.q chicken its particular shatter on the outer crust and its lighter feel on the palate.

That's the part of the franchise pedigree that matters. The fryer is the brand. The recipes — the Golden Original sauce, the Gangnam Style glaze, the Calbi-marinated wings — are uniform across the system. What changes from location to location is the consistency of the fry, the freshness of the side dishes, and the dining room.

The South Salt Lake outpost gets high marks on all three.

What's on the Plate

The menu is the standard bb.q lineup with the Korean-American fried chicken roster intact:

Golden Original — the flagship. Bone-in or boneless, fried in olive oil, finished with the original signature glaze. The dish the chain's reputation is built on.

Honey Garlic Wings — the consensus crowd-pleaser. Crisp shatter, generous sauce coverage, the kind of dish that gets ordered by the entire table even when somebody intended to order something else. The Yelp summary surfaces specifically that the honey garlic dish is 'a must-try' and 'crispy and generously coated in sauce.'

Spicy Galbi (Calbi) — the marinated-in-Korean-BBQ-sauce option. Sweet, slightly tangy, the wing build closest to what a Korean BBQ joint would serve as banchan in another format.

Gangnam Style — the brand's signature spicy option. A heavier glaze build, sweet-hot, with the kind of stickiness that requires the wet wipes the kitchen brings to the table.

Gang Jeong — the Korean-style double-fried wings tossed in a chili-soy-garlic glaze. The dish the SLCeats reviewer mentioned wanting to try on his next visit.

Rose Ddeokbokki — the dish that's emerged as the surprise hit for the South Salt Lake location. Soft chewy rice cakes in a creamy rosé sauce — tomato-and-gochujang base softened with cream — with fish cake and egg added for texture. The review summaries consistently surface it as 'creamy and rich.' It's the menu item that signals the kitchen is doing more than just frying chicken.

Sides and rice bowls round out the menu, along with a small sandwich line and a beverage program that includes the standard Korean soft drinks.

What the Reviews Are Actually Saying

The Yelp profile sits at 81 reviews; the Google footprint is at 367 and a 4.5 average. Ryan Kendrick of SLCeats covered the location in June 2025 — which is a meaningful endorsement, because Kendrick has explicitly noted he doesn't usually cover franchises and only writes them up when the operation deserves the attention.

His direct read: 'Some of the most shatteringly crisp chicken I've had, yet it still maintained its juiciness.' On the ddeokbokki: 'a fun, spicy dish composed of rice cakes and shrimp cakes doused in a slightly sweet and fairly spicy sauce. I really enjoyed it.' On the franchise overall: 'definitely worth a spot on your need to try list.'

The shatter-and-juicy combination is the line that matters. Korean fried chicken lives and dies on the contrast — the brittle, glass-thin outer shell against the meat that hasn't dried out under heat. Getting both at once requires the right batter chemistry, the right oil temperature, and a fryer that's been maintained correctly. The fact that the South Salt Lake location is hitting that combination consistently in third-party reviews suggests the franchisee is running the kitchen properly.

The aggregate praise pattern lines up: 'super crispy, flavorful chicken,' 'shatteringly crisp,' and consistent love for the honey garlic and Golden Original. The most-cited drawbacks are pricing — wings at the upper end of the South Salt Lake market — and occasional consistency on the longer cook times for the boneless and whole-chicken options.

One concrete pivot worth noting: bb.q South Salt Lake opened as a fast-casual (order at the counter) and within the first months switched to a sit-down model with table service. Most fast-casual operations in 2025 have gone the opposite direction (kiosk-and-app), so the choice to add servers is a stylistic statement. It tells you the operator wants this to feel like a Korean restaurant rather than a fried chicken counter.

Where bb.q Fits in South Salt Lake's K-Town

Worth a quick map. State Street between 3000 and 4000 South is where the Korean food density is highest in the entire valley. Baek Ri Hyang at 3460 S anchors the corridor with banchan-heavy Korean home cooking and a 4.3 rating across 576 reviews. K-Recipe at 3300 S is the small-batch operation pulling 4.9 stars from a smaller but devoted following. The older Korean BBQ houses, the Korean grocery markets, and the Korean dessert shops fill in the rest.

bb.q Chicken at 3490 S — sitting literally across from Baek Ri Hyang's address — is the franchise entry to a corridor that until now was independent-operator-only. That's a structural shift. It also means the South Salt Lake K-Town just gained the Korean fried chicken category at a serious scale, which is the one major Korean food category that had been underrepresented relative to the BBQ and the home-cooking sides of the menu.

For a Salt Lake diner who wants to do a Korean food crawl, the State Street corridor is now functionally complete: barbecue houses, banchan-and-stew operations, and the Korean fried chicken pole, all within two miles.

Planning Your Visit

Address: 3490 S State Street, South Salt Lake, UT 84115. Phone: (385) 474-7917. Hours: Sunday through Thursday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Online ordering through DoorDash, Grubhub, and the bb.q Chicken direct portal.

This is a sit-down dining room with table service. Parking is available in the lot the building shares with adjacent State Street businesses. Family-friendly. The Korean soda program and the boba-adjacent drinks make this a decent option for a teenage dinner outing.

Best first-visit order: a Golden Original whole chicken for the table (the brand's signature dish, the one that earned the reputation), a side order of Honey Garlic Wings (the most-praised dish in the customer reviews), and a Rose Ddeokbokki (the dish that signals the kitchen's range beyond the fryer). That's the three-dish snapshot that tells you whether bb.q's South Salt Lake location is the franchise running at its best.

Why It's Worth Knowing About

A 'worth checking out' recommendation, calibrated honestly. This is a franchise, not a one-of-a-kind Utah story. The food is consistent with the global brand standard. The franchisee has run the operation well enough to draw 367 Google reviews and a 4.5-star average in less than two years.

But for a South Salt Lake diner who wants Korean fried chicken at a real Korean restaurant standard — shatter crust, juicy meat, glaze that actually tastes Korean rather than American-Asian — bb.q on State Street is the address. The fact that the location has settled into the developing K-Town corridor on State Street, sitting two doors from Baek Ri Hyang and a block from K-Recipe, gives Salt Lake's Korean food scene the kind of geographic density that makes one neighborhood worth driving across the valley for.

Show up hungry. Order the whole chicken. Order the ddeokbokki. The rest of the menu earns its second visit.