The already crowded restaurant business has continued to expand over the past several years, with restaurateurs accounting for 10 percent of all self-employed businesspeople, data from the Seoul Metropolitan Government showed.

This means around 12,000 to 16,000 restaurants open each year.

Of them, the greatest number, or 57,797 sell Korean dishes. Next most popular are fried chicken restaurants (5,413), Korean-Chinese restaurants (4,770) and Japanese restaurants (4,087).

The number of restaurants in Seoul increased by 8.1 percent between 2007 and 2017.

Of all restaurant owners, 29.6 percent were in their 40s. Women in the business outnumbered men by 18.2 percentage points in 2007, but over the next 10 years the proportion flipped with 53.7 percent of the owners being men and 46.3 percent being women.

Of the businesses analyzed, 60.1 percent had just two to four employees. (khnews@heraldcorp.com)