DANDONG NIGHTLIFE
Summer nights at Dandong’s waterfront can be quite surreal. The evening starts early. About half an hour before the sun sets the Chinese border city begins a transformation into a bizarre Pyongyang themed mini-Las Vegas.
Restaurants serving North Korean food in Dandong start their evening dinner service ridiculously early. The sun doesn’t begin to set until well after seven in the mid-year summer months. But if you waited until darkness before you thought of eating your evening meal, you would miss one of Dandong’s most celebrated attractions; the song and dance shows presented by multi-skilled North Korean waitresses.
Around six is the ideal time to head to one of the countless North Korean restaurants along the waterfront. Most of them are found in the busy café and restaurant precinct south of the Broken Bridge. They are easy to find, just look out for restaurants that display a North Korean flag on their signage.
On arrival, it becomes clear that the main attraction of the restaurants are the attractive, young waitresses. Dressed in smart uniforms, or traditional Korean outfits, they politely welcome you, show you to your table and hand you a weighty menu featuring dishes similar to what is found in upmarket Pyongyang restaurants.
Most people back across the river in North Korea have to be content with tiny portions of simple food. But that’s not the offering here, where everything is fresh and abundant. The menus feature barbecued cuttlefish, roasted eel, pork, chicken and beef. Pyongyang’s famous cold noodle dish, naengmyeon is a favorite. The meals are served with glutinous white rice and the North’s kimchi, which is spicier than the variety from the South.
Once the food is ordered, and your drinks arrive, you can sit back, relax and take in what is just as important to the restaurant as the food; the propagandistic entertainment that plays out on a low stage that doubles as a dance floor.
Regime Hospitality
Its estimated there are over 150 North Korean restaurants around the world. Many are primarily regime-controlled operations that provide hard currency for financially isolated Pyongyang. Others are set-up by local businessmen searching for a lucrative restaurant theme. In these cases, the North Korean employees are contracted to the businessman as a source of cheap labor. Dandong has examples of both business models.
North Korean restaurants have been in China for decades, and over time they gradually spread further across Asia. They are found in such far-flung places as Mongolia, Nepal, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
The regime's overseas restaurant business grew from the difficult years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Until the 1990s Pyongyang had been able to rely on Moscow to support its economy. With the loss of its Soviet patron together with a devastating famine, the North Koreans struggled to obtain the hard currency needed to pay for imports from China. And so, the overseas restaurant business was born.
The restaurants are believed to be a highly lucrative source of foreign currency. Rumors circulate that they are dens for intelligence gathering. Some speculate the restaurants are directly under the wing of Pyongyang’s secretive Bureau 39, the agency that allegedly launders cash for the regime and is involved in arms sales and methamphetamine production.
In most of Dandong’s North Korean restaurants, the floor shows commence around six-thirty. The waitresses that welcomed you on arrival have since disappeared for a few minutes and returned dressed in tight sequin outfits, or perhaps colorful joseon-ot, ready to skillfully play musical instruments, sing or maybe even juggle for the entertainment of the guests.
North Korean restaurants in Dandong broadly fall into two different styles.
The restaurants which are operated directly by Pyongyang, or have a close association with the regime have a kitsch 1990’s quality. The décor is stark. The style is not that dissimilar to the restaurants comically named Restaurant Number One and Restaurant Number Two at Pyongyang’s Yanggakdo Hotel. The hostesses outfits are less contemporary, and the entertainment is likely even to include a couple of numbers played on the old-school propaganda instrument, the piano-accordion. There is a strict insistence on no photography. The atmosphere is all very Kim Jong Il era.
At the other end of the style spectrum is the modern Kim Jong Un era establishments. These restaurants also employ all North Korean staff but have Chinese management. Here everything is more colorful, brighter, and louder. Nobody is concerned about photography. This is where you will hear the latest Moranbong Band hits bashed out on synthesizers and electric guitars, complete with a computerized light show, fog machine, and animated video wall.
North Korean "Whole Foods Market"
Just south of the Friendship and Broken Bridges is the latest Kim Jong Un era eatery. In English its become known as “North Korean Whole Foods”; because it’s a North Korean replica of the USA’s Whole Foods Market outlets.
The North Korean-Chinese joint venture is part restaurant, part North Korean product supermarket, part coffee shop, and part fish market. The multi-storied complex also includes a sidewalk outdoor BBQ, cinema, karaoke club, hotel and a wine shop that strangely exclusively only stocks Australian Penfold’s wines.
The casual open-plan restaurant is staffed by North Korean waitresses outfitted in traditional joseon-ot. The environment here is hassle-free when compared to the other North Korean restaurants in Dandong. The all-day, drop-in anytime opening hours sees the waitresses working to a less hectic schedule. Here they have time to join you in a few minutes of conversation as they hover between serving customers.
The nightly floor-show starts at six. If you are western or stand out as different, the odds are that the North Korean girl-band will target you and attach you to a conga line of Chinese tourists that dances around the restaurant before finishing up all singing together with the band on stage.
Pyongyang’s most popular brew, Taedonggang lager is available everywhere in Dandong. It is widely drunk in the North Korean restaurants, and available as take-out from convenience stores near the river and around the Erjing Jie district.
Taedonggang is a favorite of travelers in North Korea, most likely largely in part because of its universal availability across the country compared to other local brands. It tastes entirely different to other Asian lagers including Dandong’s local drop, Yalu River Beer. Its bitter when compared to Chinese brews, but still sweeter than most European styles.
Taedonggang’s history is one of true North Korean legend; the story sounds unbelievable but is actually true.
In 2000 Kim Jong Il decided he wanted an international style lager beer to drink, and set his mind on building a showcase brewery in the country. The regime owned Taedonggang Brewing Company purchased the UK brewer, Ushers of Trowbridge in Wiltshire, disassembled the whole operation and moved it to East Pyongyang.
Unsavoury Activity
The most official North Korean eatery in Dandong is the Pyongyang Koryo Restaurant on Binjiang Zong Rd, a few blocks south of the Broken Bridge.
The Pyongyang Koryo is operated directly by the North Korean regime through a trading company called the Haedanghwa Group. Reported by the Swedish journalist Berti Lintner, this and other Haedanghwa Group businesses are overseas operations of Room 39, a secretive organization that seeks ways to maintain foreign currency slush funds for the ruling Kim family.
Room 39’s official title is the Central Committee Bureau 39 of the Workers’ Party of Korea. It is reportedly involved in mass counterfeiting of US $100 bills, international insurance fraud, the synthesis of methamphetamine, and production of heroin. These operations are believed to be a significant source of funds for the North Korean nuclear weapons program.
The exact operational details of the Pyongyang Koryo and the other Haedanghwa restaurants around the world are mostly unknown. However, Linter’s investigations found "The restaurants are used to earn additional money for the government in Pyongyang - at the same time as they were suspected of laundering proceeds from North Korea's more unsavory commercial activities."
Speaking to Slate in 2010 Linter explained: "Restaurants and other cash-intensive enterprises are commonly used as conduits for wads of bills, which banks otherwise would not accept as deposits.”
Once seated at the Pyongyang Koryo your order is taken by waitresses in classic 1950s styled flight attendant uniforms. You can’t help but wonder, are these gorgeous women spies?
The restaurant strictly enforces a no photography rule. The photographs displayed here were taken with concealed cameras during visits to the restaurant in 2011, and 2018.
Looking around the room, its hard to think that this little place would provide much of a boost to North Korea’s struggling balance sheet, but then again perhaps that’s the whole point.
The restaurant’s prime mission is suspected to be just to launder money. Maybe for business purposes, only the location is the key factor with the Pyongyang Koryo being only meters across the border. The regime may be just satisfied that the restaurant gives them access to the Chinese financial system, rather than them being too concerned about how successful the operation is in producing income through their food and liquor sales.
The menu includes items that you definitely won’t find in the restaurants of the Dandong Hilton or Crown Plaza; turtle and dog.
The turtle main course includes two complimentary drinks; one is turtle blood, and the other was liver mixed with alcohol. There are two dog dishes, one being a very spicy hot soup with strips of canine, and the other a cold and spicy dog meat dish with a little bit of mixed vegetable.
The floor show starts at 6:30. If you are lucky, you will visit on one of the nights that the waitresses change into their white military uniforms for the show.
The workers at the restaurants are among the tens of thousands of North Koreans dispatched by Pyongyang to produce income for the regime. To meet the grade required for this work you need to be young, attractive, multilingual and musically talented. You also need to be unquestionably patriotic and able to complete your tour-of-duty without losing sight of the mission. A result of the required focus on loyalty and duty sees the majority of waitresses drawn from elite Pyongyang families.
Even though the girls are from high-class families, they are known to live tightly controlled lives in Dandong and have little freedom outside the restaurant. The waitresses are assigned a three-year stay, but they claim that during their posting they will never be permitted to explore the city or go shopping. Instead, they spend most of their hours in the restaurant and living together in a dormitory close by.
The girls explain that they are discouraged from associating with others outside the restaurant. All say they look forward to the day that they will return to Pyongyang.
