Looks like they got their hands on a dataset of every restaurant that is licensed to serve alcohol -- or at least a decent subset of such restaurants, filtered by menu or whatever.

I checked a few dots near where I live and they're all fried chicken joints. Yeah, we do love chimaek around here. :)

americans always compare massive cities to empty states

NYC that is like 20 miles across has 11,000 locations that serve alcohol.

That country has a population of 52 million, i.e. about 5 times Ohio.

I checked a few and there's a lot of restaurants included.

https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/korea/data/korea81998.xy.t...

What's really cool is if you go to a site like [0] that shows the "true" size of countries etc. (i.e. not distorted by a projection), Indiana is probably the most analogous state to South Korea, in terms of size and shape. But South Korea has 7x the population of Indiana!

Really puts into perspective a movie like "Train to Busan", which would be like taking a train from Gary to Madison!

0: https://thetruesize.com

If this is correct, it seems like Seoul has over 40x the number of bars that Chicago has, despite having only about 4x the population

How in the hell?

South Korea really said "you will not be thirsty on our watch."

How many bars do you expect are in Ohio?

And South Korea has one of the highest rates of stomach cancer.

"Bar" doesn't mean the same thing in every country. In Spain although a bar serves alcohol of all kinds it is also where one eats breakfast and lunch and gets a coffee. They are indispensable social centers and even a tiny town of 150 has one.