- [Hikosaemon] The food has been great,
the music entertainment
was astounding, in terms of experiencing the North Korean
culture and what it's like.
It was super cool.
- [Narrator] North Korea's government owns and operates
around 130 restaurants across Asia.
The restaurants are called Pyongyang,
named after the Capital of North Korea.
Serving North Korean food and liquor
and featuring live music, the chain offers
visitors a rare glimpse into the reclusive nation's culture.
- The food is excellent, actually.
- [Narrator] Tokyo based video-blogger, Hikosaemon
visited the Pyongyang restaurant in Dalian, China.
- It looked like fairly standard Korean food,
it was variants of kimchi, various sort of,
soups and meats and so on.
It wasn't that much to look at but it really
was very good.
It was really tasty.
The beer, as well.
I think it tasted a bit like Tsingtao.
It was one of those, sort of light, sweetish
beers that they make in China.
But I have to say, I wasn't expecting much of the food.
Again, you just have this idea
that it's a resource poor country that you don't
expect the food to be a little bit austere or something.
- [Narrator] The wait staff is made up
only young North Korean women.
They serve food, perform pop songs and traditional
Korean music and chat with the diners.
- The people who are serving your meal,
they sit down at your table and you get to chat
with them for a time and ask them about North Korea
and they ask about Japan and so on
and then they go up and they sing, they dance,
they play multiple instruments.
I've never experienced anything like that at all,
I suppose.
- [Narrator] The Pyongyang restaurant chain
generates about 10 million dollars for North Korea each year
but here's the catch:
the restaurants are a direct violation of UN sanctions.
- The United Nations Security Council has required
any country in the world that's a member of the
United Nations to enforce sanctions
on North Korea to limit it's access to foreign currency
and to foreign products and these are very wide-ranging
sanctions and they include things
like allowing them to operate joint ventures or businesses
in your country.
So, the United Nations has passed this resolution.
It was agreed to by all the major countries,
including China and the United States
but it's up to each individual country
to enforce those sanctions and so countries
can choose to either look the other way
or lightly enforce it or not enforce it at all.
- [Narrator] Pyongyang employees are selected
by the government and kept under a watchful eye.
- The one thing that's interesting about these businesses
is what it requires North Korea to do
is send its own people out into the world.
In North Korea, you're not actually allowed to leave
the country. That's why people will call it a prison camp.
You have to get special permission and it's
really hard to get and almost no one gets to go abroad
and when they do go abroad, they're tightly isolated
and kept away.
- I just appreciated the fact that
it sort of humanized the image of the country
just a little bit while at the same time
still having all that thing,
that you know them and
the restaurant's there for hard currency for the regime
and the people there are not strictly free.
They are, they have minders.
They can go out in town with minders and so on
but basically, they live in a dorm
attached to the restaurant.
It didn't feel like I was at a prison camp
or being spied upon,
as much as you might expect that to be.
It actually surprised me at how normal it was
and it was a pleasant evening in spite of
perhaps knowing what else is going on.
- [Narrator] The restaurants made news in 2016
when a crew of 13 workers defected to South Korea.
South Korea's foreign ministry has advised people
to not dine in Pyongyang restaurants
because the profits benefit the Kim regime.
But with warming relations between North Korea
and the rest of the world,
these chains may become less taboo in the future.