◆ Online ordering for Korean restaurants

KBBQ stays at the table. The fried chicken travels. Your ordering platform should know the difference — and stop taking a cut of the chicken box.

A Korean menu is really two businesses: a dine-in KBBQ experience that does not travel, and a delivery-native side — double-fried chicken, bowls, jjigae, dosirak — that the marketplaces feed on at a 25-35% blended real cost. Zay-OS is commission-free direct ordering that splits the two cleanly, models half-and-half chicken and banchan sets as real modifiers, ships the dosirak as one SKU, and runs delivery-only virtual brands off the same kitchen. Live at Naya Grill today. $499/month flat.

Quick answer

Zay-OS is commission-free direct online ordering built for Korean restaurants. It splits the menu into what belongs at the table (KBBQ, on QR dine-in ordering at a $0 diner fee) and what travels (Korean fried chicken in whole / half / combo boxes with half-and-half sauce splits, bibimbap and bowls as a base × protein × heat matrix, jjigae with packaging logic on the ticket, dosirak as a one-tap SKU). Banchan is modeled as a defined set with priced extras so packaging costs stop leaking. Delivery-only virtual brands run off the same kitchen, marketplace orders ingest into the same tablet via Otter, and direct orders carry 0% commission — the diner pays a small flat fee ($0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery) and the restaurant keeps 100% of food revenue and tips.

Korean-kitchen-specific

What a Korean restaurant actually needs from an ordering platform.

KBBQ dine-in vs delivery: two businesses, one platform

Korean BBQ is a dine-in experience — the tabletop grill, the sizzle, the two-hour table. It does not travel, and pretending it does wrecks reviews. What travels is the other half of the menu: fried chicken, bowls, stews, dosirak. Zay-OS lets one restaurant run both honestly — QR dine-in ordering at the grill tables with a $0 diner fee, and a delivery-native menu (or a separate virtual brand) for everything that actually survives a 20-minute drive. Neither side confuses the other.

Korean fried chicken, the delivery-native category

Double-fried Korean chicken is one of the few foods engineered to still be crisp when it lands — which is exactly why it became a delivery-first category and why the marketplaces feed on it. Zay-OS models KFC the way it is ordered: whole / half / combo boxes, wings vs drumsticks vs boneless, sauce tossed or on the side, and half-and-half splits (yangnyeom one side, soy-garlic the other) as real modifiers instead of a prayer typed into a notes box.

Banchan packaging economics

At the table, banchan is free and self-replenishing. In a delivery bag, every kimchi, namul, and pickled radish is a container, a lid, a label, and 40-60 cents of packaging that generic platforms make invisible. Zay-OS models banchan as a defined included set with swap choices, plus paid extras for the diner who wants double kimchi — so the banchan tradition survives delivery without silently eating the margin on every order.

Dosirak lunch boxes for the office crowd

The dosirak — protein, rice, banchan, one box — is the weekday lunch order that offices repeat. Zay-OS ships it as a single SKU with the protein as a pick-one modifier (bulgogi, spicy pork, chicken, tofu), so a team of eight checks out in a minute instead of assembling thirty line items. Reorder-from-history keeps the Tuesday dosirak habit on your channel at 0% commission instead of a marketplace app.

Stews and soups that actually travel

Kimchi jjigae, sundubu, budae jjigae, galbitang — soup is half the Korean menu and the hardest thing to deliver well. Zay-OS carries the packaging logic on the ticket: broth sealed separately, rice on the side, soft tofu handled gently, banchan boxed apart. The kitchen ticket says how the order packs, not just what is in it, so the sundubu arrives as dinner instead of a spill.

Bibimbap and bowls as a real matrix

Bowls are the other delivery-native half of the menu: base (rice, purple rice, salad) × protein (bulgogi, spicy pork, chicken, tofu, mushroom) × gochujang heat level × toppings. Generic platforms flatten that into notes-box roulette. Zay-OS models it as a matrix, so the mild-tofu-no-egg order fires exactly as built and never comes back.

Combos, sets & anju logic

Korean menus sell in sets — chicken + beer-food sides, jjigae + rice + banchan, family meals feeding 4. Zay-OS builds set SKUs with pick-one and pick-two slots priced correctly, and surfaces the attach items (tteokbokki, kimbap, corn cheese, extra rice) as one-tap add-ons at checkout, so the ticket climbs the way a good server would climb it.

Virtual brands from one kitchen

A KBBQ house with a strong fryer can run a delivery-only Korean fried chicken brand out of the same line — different name, different menu, same kitchen. The Concierge tier includes up to 5 virtual brands per kitchen, so the dine-in brand stays premium while the delivery brand fights the chicken category on its own terms. Orders from every brand land on the same tablet.

Marketplace ingest via Otter (one tablet)

DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub orders ingest into the same kitchen tablet as your direct Zay-OS orders. One menu is the single source of truth across every channel — no tablet wall next to the fryer, no double-entry, no 86ing the half-and-half in four different apps when the yangnyeom sauce runs out on a Friday night.

Korean & transliteration schema indexing

The Zay-OS schema carries Korean and transliterated alternateName variants so diners searching the way they actually type — "korean fried chicken near me," "kbbq near me," "한국 식당," "치킨 배달" — find your storefront. The visible storefront stays in your brand language; the discovery layer reaches the Korean-and-Konglish-searching diner base generic platforms never index for.

The Korean-restaurant economics reality

A delivery-native category, a dine-in experience, and a commission that only taxes the half that travels.

The Korean restaurant economy in America runs through a handful of dense corridors: Koreatown Los Angeles — the largest in the country, packed along Olympic and Western — plus 32nd Street's K-town in Manhattan, Broad Avenue through Palisades Park and Fort Lee in Bergen County, Annandale in Northern Virginia, Duluth in metro Atlanta's Gwinnett County, and the H Mart-anchored strips around Chicago and Dallas. These kitchens share a structural quirk no other cuisine has to this degree: half the business physically cannot leave the building. The tabletop grill is the product. Nobody deliveries the KBBQ experience — but everybody deliveries the other half of the menu, because double-fried Korean chicken is arguably the most delivery-native food in America, engineered to stay crisp through a 20-minute drive. That is exactly the half the marketplaces tax: a 15-30% base commission with a blended real cost of 25-35% once stacked fees are counted, on the whole-chicken combos and family jjigae orders that run well past an average ticket. A typical independent loses $48,000-plus a year per location to those commissions (a modeled estimate at roughly 650 marketplace orders a month, mid-$20s average ticket, 25% take).

The generic platforms make it worse by not understanding the food. Half-and-half chicken — yangnyeom one side, soy-garlic the other — is the single most common Korean fried chicken order, and most order flows cannot express it, so it lives in a notes box and comes back wrong. Banchan, free and abundant at the table, becomes an invisible packaging cost in delivery — five little containers per bag that nobody priced. The dosirak becomes a pile of line items no office manager will assemble on a phone. Jjigae ships without packaging logic and arrives as a spill. And the restaurant that should be running a delivery-only chicken brand off its fryer line instead watches the chicken chains own the category on the apps.

Zay-OS is built around exactly this split. QR dine-in ordering keeps the KBBQ side at the table at a $0 diner fee. The delivery menu is scoped to what travels, with the fried-chicken matrix (size × cut × sauce × half-and-half) firing exactly as built, banchan modeled as defined sets with priced extras, dosirak as a one-tap SKU, and packaging logic printed on the jjigae ticket. The Concierge tier runs up to 5 virtual brands per kitchen, so the delivery chicken brand fights on its own terms — and if the delivery-only model is your whole concept, the ghost kitchens page goes deeper. At $499/month flat — the diner paying a small flat fee ($0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery), the restaurant keeping 100% of food revenue and tips — the platform replaces the percentage cut that delivery-native Korean volume feeds hardest. Zay-OS is live today at Naya Grill, a Lebanese fast-casual brand in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, Florida; Korean restaurants in every market — from Koreatown LA to Broad Avenue to Duluth — are now onboarding onto the same backbone.

Imagine your Korean kitchen on Zay-OS

Naya Grill — already live. Your Korean restaurant next.

Naya Grill is a fast-casual brand running two FL locations on Zay-OS, with direct orders and DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub all routing into one kitchen tablet via Otter. The same modifier engine, one-tablet workflow, and commission-free direct channel apply straight to a Korean menu — a KBBQ house with a delivery side, a fried-chicken concept, a dosirak and bowl kitchen. Different cuisine, same operational backbone, same 0% on every direct order.

2
FL locations
0%
on direct orders
KO
Korean schema indexed
5
virtual brands / kitchen
Korean-restaurant flat pricing

$499/month per location. 0% on every direct chicken box.

Operator is $499/month per location. Operator + Marketplace (Otter-ingested DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub) is $599. Concierge is $699/month per location (up to 5 virtual brands per kitchen included — run a delivery-only fried-chicken brand off the KBBQ line). The diner pays a small flat service fee ($0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, $0 dine-in), catering bills at 10%, there is no setup fee, plans are month-to-month, and the restaurant keeps 100% of food revenue. No percentage cut on orders, no cut on tips.

Full pricing breakdown →
Korean-restaurant operator questions

Asked by Korean-restaurant owners we have talked to.

Why do delivery marketplaces hit Korean restaurants especially hard?
Because the Korean delivery order skews big and delivery-native. A whole-chicken combo with tteokbokki and sides, or a two-jjigae family order with rice and extras, runs well past the average ticket — and Korean fried chicken in particular is a category diners order for delivery by default, so the volume flows straight through the apps. DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub charge a 15-30% base commission, and the blended real cost typically lands at 25-35% once the stacked fees are counted. A typical independent loses $48,000-plus a year to those commissions (modeled at roughly 650 marketplace orders a month at a mid-$20s average ticket and a 25% take). Zay-OS gives the diner a direct path at 0% commission: the restaurant keeps 100% of food revenue and tips, and the diner pays a small flat fee ($0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery) instead of a percentage that scales with the chicken box.
Can one restaurant run KBBQ dine-in and a delivery menu without them colliding?
Yes — that split is the core Korean use case. Dine-in runs on QR ordering at the grill tables with a $0 diner fee, keeping the tabletop experience intact. Delivery and pickup run a separate menu scoped to what travels: fried chicken, bowls, stews, dosirak, kimbap. Items can live on one menu, the other, or both, and a delivery-only virtual brand can carry the fryer side under its own name. The KBBQ brand never gets a one-star review for cold brisket it should never have shipped.
How does Zay-OS handle banchan on delivery orders?
As a modeled set, not an afterthought. Each entrée carries its defined banchan set — say, pick 3 of 6 — with swaps as included choices and extras (double kimchi, extra namul) as priced add-ons. The kitchen ticket lists exactly which banchan to pack, and the packaging cost is priced into the menu instead of leaking out of the margin one 2-oz container at a time. Diners still feel the generosity of the banchan tradition; the restaurant stops giving away 40-60 cents of packaging invisibly on every bag.
Can it do half-and-half fried chicken and sauce options as real modifiers?
Yes. Whole / half / combo sizing, cut choice (wings, drumsticks, boneless, whole bird), sauce as tossed-or-on-the-side, and half-and-half splits — yangnyeom and soy-garlic, snow cheese and honey butter — are all first-class modifiers with their own prices. The order the diner builds is the order the fryer station reads. No free-text notes box, no wrong-sauce refund on a Saturday night.
What about dosirak and office lunch orders?
The dosirak ships as one SKU with the protein as a pick-one modifier and sides as defined slots, so an office order for eight is eight clean lines, not thirty. Reorder-from-history makes the weekly habit one tap. For bigger recurring office drops, catering-scale orders run through the catering flow at a flat 10% — still a fraction of a marketplace cut, and the kitchen gets lead time to batch the boxes.
Can I run a delivery-only Korean fried chicken brand from my existing kitchen?
Yes. The Concierge tier ($699/month per location) includes up to 5 virtual brands per kitchen. A KBBQ house or full-menu Korean restaurant can launch a chicken-only delivery brand — its own name, menu, and storefront — off the same fryer line, with every order landing on the same kitchen tablet alongside dine-in and marketplace tickets. It is the standard play for winning the delivery chicken category without discounting the flagship brand.
How fast can a Korean restaurant go live?
Most operators are live in under 2 weeks. Menu build (including the fried-chicken modifier matrix and banchan sets), storefront setup, and Otter routing for the marketplace channels all happen inside that window, and there is no setup fee and no long-term contract — Zay-OS is month-to-month.
Is Zay-OS live at Korean restaurants today?
Honest answer: Zay-OS is live today at Naya Grill, a Lebanese fast-casual brand with two Florida locations (Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach), running direct and marketplace orders through one kitchen tablet via Otter. Korean restaurants — including the dense corridors like Koreatown Los Angeles, 32nd Street in Manhattan, Broad Avenue through Palisades Park and Fort Lee in New Jersey, Annandale in Northern Virginia, and Duluth in metro Atlanta — are now onboarding. The KBBQ/delivery split, fried-chicken matrix, banchan sets, and dosirak flow described on this page are the Korean-restaurant configuration of the same live platform.

Built for Korean kitchens. Now onboarding.

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