2011 Korean Economic Census is the first economic census in Korea, which contains text data on menus

served by Korean-food restaurants as well as structured data on characteristics of restaurants including

area, opening year and total sales. In this paper, we applied text mining to the text data and investigated

statistical and technical issues and characteristics of Korean text mining. Pork belly roast was the most

popular menu across provinces and/or restaurant types in year 2010, and the number of restaurants per

10000 people was especially high in Kangwon-do and Daejeon metropolitan city. Beef tartare and fried pork cutlet are popular menus in start-up restaurants while whole chicken soup and maeuntang (spicy fish stew) are in long-lived restaurants. These results can be used as a guideline for menu development to restaurant owners, and for government policy-making process that lead small restaurants to choose proper menus for successful business.