North Korean Restaurant in Busan: Baekil Pyongnaeng

I've been wanting to visit a North Korean restaurant for years. I'm not entirely sure what that says about me. Probably that I'm a foreigner.

There's a particular kind of fascination with North Korea that seems to hit non-Koreans harder than Koreans themselves. Ask most South Koreans about North Korea and you'll get a shrug, a polite answer about reunification, and a pretty clear signal that this is not a topic anyone is burning to discuss. Ask a foreigner who's been living in Korea for a year and you'll get thirty minutes of half-informed monologue.

Before I went, I knew the rough outline: cold noodles, North Korea's most famous dish, made from buckwheat, served in a cold broth.

Pyongyang Naengmyeon (평양냉면) is the polar opposite of what most people expect Korean food to taste like. No heat, no bold fermented depth, no punch. It tastes clean and slightly cold-mineral in a way that takes a few sips to understand.

I think for most people it takes a few bowls to fully get. All I know is that I'm not there yet. The Michelin listing is either evidence that I'm missing something, or that Michelin reviewers have considerably more patience for cold broth than I do. Possibly both.

Baekil Pyongnaeng (백일냉면) has been doing Pyongyang naengmyeon long enough to end up in the Michelin Guide and get a feature on Saenghwal Darin (Little Big Masters). It's in the guide on its own merits, not because of the North Korea angle.

The staff serving us had a North Korean accent. I don't hear this myself, but my Korean girlfriend said it immediately. It made the experience feel less like a themed restaurant and more like the actual thing.

I ordered the naengmyeon, mandu, and bulgogi. The naengmyeon broth was cold in a way that a refrigerated liquid is cold. Unlike other naengmyeon this one did not have actual ice to keep it cold.

The mandu were enormous. I don't mean large. I mean each dumpling was roughly the size of my fist, stuffed with a mix of pork and vegetables.

The bulgogi was good. But it raises some questions. Cows are classified as working animals important for agriculture, and killing one without permission carries serious consequences. The result is that beef is rare.

A black market exists, as black markets tend to in places where certain things are officially unavailable. Whether the bulgogi at a North Korean restaurant in Busan reflects authentic North Korean food or it's adapted for the South Korean market, I cannot tell you.

Here's how Pyongyang naengmyeon became, briefly, the most talked-about food in South Korea.

At the April 2018 inter-Korean summit, Kim Jong-un arranged for noodles from Okryu-gwan, Pyongyang's most famous naengmyeon restaurant, to be brought across the border and served at the dinner. Moon Jae-in ate them and said it was one of his favourite dishes.

That is politician talk. You do not travel to a historic summit on the North Korean border and come back saying the broth was fine but you personally prefer jjajangmyeon.

Suddenly everyone wanted Pyongyang naengmyeon. Restaurants that had been serving it quietly for years found themselves with lines around the block and food content about naengmyeon exploded. Slowly the hype faded, as hypes do.

Busan, Suyeong-gu, Namcheon Bada-ro.

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