A Brief Journey Inside Pyongyang’s North Korean Restaurant
With an open and neutral mind, Marilyn, a French student visits Shanghai’s Pyongyang-Koryo Hall Restaurant in order to gain first hand access into the people and culture of North Korea
Last academic year, I (Marilyn, 21), a student from France decided to move to Shanghai for 8 months in order to pursue my studies under my University’s exchange program. Like China, the public perception of North Korea is not one without controversy. It’s nuclear ambitions and accusations of human right abuse are two of many other widely discussed topics that surround the country.
However, due to the nation’s relationship with the international community, very few people gain true insights into the nature of the country and therefore little is understood as to what drives the regime. As a result, the quality of sources and data needed in order to generate stories can often be thin on the ground.
Stanford University’s David Straub describes “an exponential increase” in the number of people publicising and circulating anything “even remotely plausible about North Korea” (and in established media passing it on). And with consumers happy to buy entertainment as news, “Weird North Korea” stories that portray the nation as a caricature of itself appear to do a roaring trade. Armed with this knowledge, I wanted to see what it was like to personally meet a North Korean.
For most of us, our culinary knowledge of North Korean cuisine will be shrouded in mystery due to the closed nature of the rogue state. However recently, a number of Pyongyang-backed restaurants have popped up across Asia, including 10 in Beijing and 7 in Shanghai. As a result of this, many people outside of the North Korean bubble have been allowed to gain the first hand dining experience in North Korean cuisine.
So on a Boxing Day night, a group of friends and I finally decided to head down to one of the 7 restaurants listed in Shanghai’s TimeOut website. It was the Pyongyang Koryo Hall.
Upon arriving, it felt as though one had truly entered North Korean soil in China. Everything was meticulously made to be typically Korean from the paintings to how the staff were dressed. There was even a small TV which appeared to be broadcasting propaganda short videos. It was quite interesting to see the reactions of the other friends, one of whom was a South Korean citizen (the other was American). Although, we all seemed to be as intrigued as each other. Initially, I was afraid to talk about visiting a North Korean restaurant with my South Korean friend. But they had all agreed, much to my surprise.
Prior to my visit, I understood that there would be a performance from the North Korean waitress. As this was a focal point of the experience, we did not want to be late and miss the show. So we soon found our tables and sat down quietly, just as it started to sink-in exactly where we were.
The waitresses were all wearing impeccably neat Hanboks (traditional Korean clothing). However, we could only communicate with them in either Korean or Chinese Mandarin. Despite this, the waitresses were keen to show us their patronage to their nation through traditional song and dance. Much to my surprise, the North Korean waitress began to sing ‘Xiao Ping Guo’ (My Little Apple), a Chinese pop song that is shared among young people.
After the show, I had the chance to speak for a bit with one of the waitresses on her background. She told me that she used to work in a famous hotel in Pyongyang. Presumably, she may be referring to the Ryugyong Hotel, a 105-story pyramid-shaped skyscraper in Pyongyang. Built in 1987, but never truly completed due to the economic woes of both North Korea and the Soviet Union (which later fell in 1992). However, today the construction serves as a multipurpose building which houses a hotel for visitors of the country.
The waitress also told me that all the ingredients for these dishes were all sourced directly from North Korea. I don’t know if this part was entirely true. Nevertheless, the food sure was delicious. I had ordered cold noodle (typical North Korean dish) and a type of bulgogi, but with different taste. For the dishes, there were two menus: One with Chinese and Korean and the other with awfully bad (albeit comical) English translation.
North Koreans tend to speak in a completely different dialect to South Koreans, and so whenever they spoke in Korean I failed to comprehend what they were saying despite being accustomed to Korean culture, language, and its people. From this linguistic experience, I could truly feel the difference between North and South Korean people.
The North Korean ‘Pyongyang-Koryo’ restaurants tend to be quite popular among the Chinese, as there were noticeably a lot of Chinese business men dining with their families. In my two visits to the restaurant, I was told strictly not to take photos inside, however I still managed to grab a few shots. For a country that is famous for being tightly controlled, the rules were surprisingly relaxed.
On the first visit, we noticed several Chinese guests taking photos, so we asked politely if we could also take photos, and to my delight they accepted. However, on the second visit we were not permitted to take photos. Maybe we were pushing our luck a bit.
In the end, I was happy with my visit. I had explored something very few get to experience. From inside accounts from North Korean defectors who succeed in escaping from the regime, we can outline how North Koreans people live their lives. Most of the North Korean population are poor and has had a fair amount of psychological brainwashing since infancy. But the important thing is that we need to understand them, and not play into the regime’s narrative and isolate them.
In my quest to open up the country and its people to the rest of the world, I hope I had helped in humanising the country. While this does not dispel the horrors of the regime, North Koreans certainly do deserve more honest reporting. As a Westerner, I was ashamed to find so much journalistic hyperbole during the release of ‘The Interview’.
I wrote an interesting article last year about my unique encounter with various North Korean officials hired by the regime to create art. Needless to say, just talking to them and viewing their art crushed my worldview of them. North Koreans deserve a fair reflection of their society in Western journalism.
After all, we want to live in a world of peace and mutual understanding. It has been 65 years since the start of the Korean War, I think it’s about time we started to sow the seeds of reconciliation.
Written by Ash Chetri & Marilyn F.
Ash is a recent graduate in Cognitive Neuroscience with a keen interest in international relations in the Asia-Pacific region. He has written several articles on North Korea, and is interested in promoting peace and stability.
Marilyn is a graduate in LLCE langue, littérature, culture étrangère chinoise (Language, literature, Chinese culture). She strives to help build a positive relationship with rogue nations such as North Korea with the rest of the world for wider peace.
