Inside the 9-year-old North Korean restaurant in Hanoi

A one million dong meal for two with surveillance cameras, cold food and music typical of North Korean culture.

A one-million-dong meal at the Pyongyang restaurant includes: flounder with kimchi sauce, cold noodles, seafood cakes and fish egg soup. Photo: Trang Bui

In Trung Hoa area, Cau Giay, where the Korean Embassy is located, there are hundreds of Korean restaurants. Few people know that in this area, there are also two North Korean restaurants, two gateways in Vietnam connecting to the country considered "the most mysterious in the world".

From the outside, it looks not much different from a Korean restaurant, both Pyongyang and Koryo seem to have few customers. We arrived at the Pyongyang restaurant on Nguyen Thi Dinh street on a Tuesday night, the lights on the first floor were off, the tables and chairs were dusty, and there was only a receptionist with a ponytail leading us to the second floor.

The dining room, about 100 square meters, was serving a group of Korean men, a few Westerners, and two Vietnamese. The simple wooden tables and chairs, the old LCD TV playing music praising the leader, the small stage covered with red curtains and flashing red and blue lights reminded me of the neighborhood arts atmosphere in Vietnam in 1999 and 2000.

Every night from 7:30, there is a one-hour cultural show. Some people come but don't get to see it, because the restaurant sometimes cancels the show without notice.

7:40, no MC, no introduction, loud music suddenly started. In just a few seconds, the waitresses quickly changed into hanbok, tied their hair in ponytails, clipped large red and blue bows, sang while playing the organ, guitar and traditional jang-gu drum.

Although the speakers were a bit distorted, the girls sang with great enthusiasm and played the instruments skillfully. After about 20 minutes of singing songs praising the leader, they moved on to sing "As if Uncle Ho were here on the great victory day" and "Wish" by My Tam.

“It’s okay to take pictures of food,” the 21-year-old employee, nicknamed Hoa Mai, told us in fluent Vietnamese about the filming restrictions. Hoa Mai has been in Vietnam for two and a half years. Like all the employees, she is an intern at Pyongyang Tourism University and has only six months left in Vietnam.

North Korean food is quite similar to South Korean food, very spicy and with lots of kimchi. Three of the four dishes we ordered were loaded with kimchi: flounder in sauce, cold noodles, and fish egg soup. Korean food is usually hot and spicy, but that day at the Pyongyang restaurant, all four dishes were cold.

It's hard to give 3 stars to cold food, but we learned one thing: North Koreans don't leave food uneaten.

"You eat it, it's fine," Hoa Mai pointed at the strange fish roe in the kimchi soup, grimacing. She was sure this was a rare fish found only in Korea, but she didn't know how to write its name in Latin characters.

In an interview with food website Munchies (Vice), Simon Cockerell, a tour operator who has been traveling to North Korea for 14 years, said many North Koreans still remember the famine of the 1990s in every meal.

“Anyone over the age of 20 has some memory of the famine,” Cockerell told Munchies. “They know that it’s a waste to leave a meal they didn’t have, so they try to eat it all. There’s no wasting food.”

I only found out about this later, but seeing Hoa Mai's disappointed eyes, we had to ask her to pack four boxes to take home.

Like most North Korean restaurants around the world, food in Pyongyang is quite expensive: 250,000 VND for a bottle of North Korea's famous beer, Taedonggang. Since the bill was almost 1 million VND for two people, we had to leave the beer for later.

North Korean restaurants, along with a large workforce of overseas miners and textile workers, are now one of the country’s main sources of remittances, according to an April 2016 Washington Post investigation. Since the 1994-1998 famine that killed nearly a tenth of the population, leader Kim Jong Il has opened a series of restaurants in China and Southeast Asia to revive the country and cope with economic sanctions.

Another investigation by Reuters in April 2016 said that at its peak, the number of North Korean restaurants reached 130, spread as far as Dubai and Amsterdam. South Korea estimated that these restaurants brought in $10 million in remittances to the Kim dynasty each year.

According to the South Korean news agency Yonhap, in April 2016, North Korea closed 20 restaurants in China and the United Arab Emirates, partly because of declining business and partly because of the incident of 13 employees at a Chinese restaurant defecting to South Korea on April 8.

Entrance to the Pyongyang restaurant on Nguyen Thi Dinh street, Trung Hoa, Cau Giay, Hanoi. Photo: Trang Bui

Living in Vietnam, employees of the Pyongyang restaurant said they were allowed to hang out, take selfies with customers and even have Facebook accounts.

In addition, the staff live together in the dormitory, take Vietnamese names and, as a reflex, always cover their faces when being photographed by unexpected guests.

"Sorry, but we probably can't [add friends on Facebook]," Hoa Mai's friend Hoa Huong smiled apologetically and said in Vietnamese, before hurriedly paying us, ending her shift.

According to VNE