Name: Inside North Korea's Controversial Restaurant Chain
Uploaded: 2018-07-17T10:43:26.000Z
Duration: 3 min 40 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

was astounding, in terms of experiencing the North Korean

- [Narrator] North Korea's government owns and operates

and featuring live music, the chain offers

visitors a rare glimpse into the reclusive nation's culture.

- [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,

It wasn't that much to look at but it really

It was one of those, sort of light, sweetish

But I have to say, I wasn't expecting much of the food.

that it's a resource poor country that you don't

expect the food to be a little bit austere or something.

They serve food, perform pop songs and traditional

they sit down at your table and you get to chat

with them for a time and ask them about North Korea

and then they go up and they sing, they dance,

I've never experienced anything like that at all,

- [Narrator] The Pyongyang restaurant chain

generates about 10 million dollars for North Korea each year

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

on North Korea to limit its access to foreign currency

and to foreign products and these are very wide-ranging

like allowing them to operate joint ventures or businesses

So, the United Nations has passed this resolution.

It was agreed to by all the major countries,

to enforce those sanctions and so countries

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 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

it sort of humanized the image of the country

the restaurant's there for hard currency for the regime

and the people there are not strictly free.

They can go out in town with minders and so on

It didn't feel like I was at a prison camp

It actually surprised me at how normal it was

and it was a pleasant evening in spite of

- [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

because the profits benefit the Kim regime.

But with warming relations between North Korea

these chains may become less taboo in the future.

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Inside North Korea's Controversial Restaurant Chain

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