Food in North Korea

There is not much point in reviewing individual restaurants in North Korea, as visitors have no opportunity to go out and try a restaurant of their own choice.  Tours are fully escorted, and visitors will be taken to a specific restaurant for a set meal.

Royal Banquet

Although is relatively little choice over the food provided, most meals take the form of a variety of small dishes, so you can to some extent choose what you actually eat, and it was generally very tasty. The selection generally includes some form of soup, vegetables, fish, meat, hard-boiled eggs or omelette, as well as the ubiquitous kimchi (spicy pickled cabbage.)  Meals like this were provided at both lunch and dinner, which is rather more than I would usually eat in a day. In Kaesong we had a rather more elaborate version of the set meal, described as a royal banquet. 

The only actual menu choice we had was ‘rice or noodle’ for the filler provided at the end of the meal.  The noodles were Pyongyang cold noodles – a large bowl containing a tight knot of pre-cooked buckwheat noodles in cold water, with a garnish of a slice of meat and hard boiled egg.  You go in with your chopsticks and tease the noodles apart, adding spicy sauce to taste.  We tried these on our first night, but preferred the rice, which comes studded with small cubes of meat and vegetables. After we had both chosen rice at two successive meals, we were not offered noodles again.

A couple of times we ate in the KITC restaurant in Pyongyang  where the selection of dishes included cooked sausage and strips of potato in a batter, meaning that it was technically possible to have North Korean version of the great British ‘sausage, egg and chips.’  

Variations on the standard set meal are barbecue, where you cook your own slices of meat (pork, beef and octopus or squid) on a hotplate over a brazier, and hotpot, where you boil sliced meat, vegetables and egg in a pot at the table.  We had barbecue on our first night and a special duck barbecue on our last night. We also had hotpot on one occasion, and on New Year’s Eve, as a special treat, we had a small pizza alongside the other dishes.

I felt guilty that we were fed so much better than the average North Korean.