North Korea touts BBQ restaurant boom, but sceptics dismiss it as propaganda
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SEOUL: North Korea is projecting a new culinary obsession: multi-story barbecue restaurants with waterside terraces, marble tabletops inlaid with grills, and menus featuring beef, pork, and ostrich.
Since September, state media has announced over a dozen new "bulgogi" restaurants nationwide, a Korean word that usually refers to grilled meat in North Korea.
Dismissed by some as government propaganda, the proliferation is striking in a country that has long struggled to feed its people. The UN food body said in its latest report on the country that more than two out of every five North Koreans were undernourished.
Analysts say the openings reflect a push by leader Kim Jong Un to portray a growing prosperity across the country, although sceptics wonder how accessible or busy the restaurants will be.
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One new restaurant in Sinuiju, a city on the Chinese border, is three stories tall. In northern Kanggye, patrons can drink draft beer alongside a fish tank, while in the west coast city of Nampo, an opening ceremony included fireworks. Other restaurants tout unusually large floor plans that can seat hundreds.
Meat is an important symbol for the regime and recalls the promise of the late Kim Il Sung, a former leader and grandfather of Kim Jong Un, to give his people "white rice with meat soup", said Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein, head of Korean Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The openings mirror the spread of other leisure initiatives like waterparks, coffee bars, and high-end malls. While Kim has not yet been pictured at these openings, they are usually attended by high-level local officials.
"I think it's a way of showing all these nice things ... they're coming to people outside of Pyongyang, too," Silberstein said.
The restaurants may be further evidence that some North Koreans, especially in trade and construction, are benefiting from growing ties with Russia, said Hazel Smith, professorial research associate in Korean Studies at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies.
But "this is not a sign that you've got a thriving economy - it's a sign that some people at the moment are able to get by and afford to go out and have a meal now and then," she said.
North Korea's economy grew 3.5 per cent in 2025, a third straight year above 3 per cent, South Korea's central bank said in July.
FOOD STRUGGLES
During the 1990s famine, the state's food distribution system collapsed and hundreds of thousands of people died, pushing North Koreans toward private markets to survive.
Semi-private markets and support from China and Russia have since brought more stability, analysts say. Meat imports from China more than quadrupled between 2023 and 2025 to nearly US$39 million, according to UN Comtrade data.
Joung Eun-lee, director of the North Korean Research Division at the South Korean government-funded Korea Institute for National Unification, says the rising imports show domestic production can not meet demand.
The state media coverage of restaurant openings serves as a "powerful form of propaganda", she said.
Kim has urged cadres to improve domestic livestock production, but food supply is believed to remain precarious. The UN World Food Programme estimated that 10.7 million people, more than 40 per cent of the North Korean population, were undernourished in 2022.
Lee Ae-Ran, who defected from North Korea in 1997, said beef was very hard to obtain because cows were reserved as working animals on farms. She remembers eating once at a Pyongyang duck bulgogi restaurant where patrons had to pay in foreign currency.
Lee now runs a North Korean restaurant in Seoul. She said the openings likely serve as propaganda projecting prosperity.
"In North Korea, high-end restaurants are only for special classes of people," she said.
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