As I think I have mentioned before we live in a predominantly Japanese/ Taiwanese/Korean area of Shanghai, with our own Japanese Department Store, Takashimaya, above our metro station and with a number of smaller shops and restaurants in the area selling country specific food.  We can easily buy Korean kimchi at a number of corner shops around here, sushi elsewhere, and probably, although I’ve not sought it out, Taiwanese Bubble Tea.  We can eat Japanese bar food, or go to one of several Korean or Japanese Barbecue restaurants all within easy walking distance.

Also within easy walking distance is one of a number of North Korean Pyongyang Restaurants in Shanghai. Ours, PingRang GaoLi Restaurant as been a lure ever since we moved into our apartment, as early in the evening ladies in over-the-top traditional Korean dress stand at the ground floor entrance trying to entice customers into the place, whilst never actually leaving its threshold.  I have been a couple of times, once with a friend of my daughter’s who is currently teaching English at a school in Seoul, South Korea and last week with a group of people from the UK’s Pret à Manger business who have a couple of stores here in Shanghai.

If you go early enough in the evening  – we are talking 6pm here – these ladies will show you upstairs to the second floor (1st floor in UK speak) restaurant and to a whole surreal experience that mixes average quality Korean food with a Butlin’s-style performance  – the waitresses themselves become the performers at 7pm, once they have served the food and made a quick change.

The food was generally unremarkable – you don’t go to the place for the food, more for the experience.

At 7pm a number of the waitress disappear and change into a mixture of traditional Korean costumes and western-style velvet dresses and sing North Korean popular songs, and perform a number of acts including what looked like Irish dancing with some of the girls playing bass guitar, keyboard and a set of drums.

Towards the end of the show unsuspecting customers have plastic flower garlands placed on their heads which marks them out later on for being collected up into a North Korean version of the conga whilst the singers sing a song to their Great Leader.

The first time I went, was with James (and his brother Peter who had met up with him to tour China) which made the whole experience particularly interesting for me. James, speaking some Korean, was able to talk to and translate for the waitresses.  He was careful to use North Korean terminology all the time that he was speaking to them, one in particular kept coming back to talk and they were particularly chatty with him.  They liked the fact that we came from England but would not engage in anything about themselves or what they thought of Shanghai, or even Gubei Lu.

All was going swimmingly until two issues disrupted things.  First of all they do not like their customers taking photos, or videos.  For James this was a shame as he was using a video camera to document his China trip for his English students back home in Korea and I, as you know, like to document everything that I have done since arriving in Shanghai.  They could tolerate us taking photos of the food, but whenever a camera was pointed at a waitress someone hovering behind always said “No photos.  No Photos” over our shoulders.  We did what we could and managed to capture pictures of some of the waitresses, even whilst they were performing, but it was

That No Photo Moment

difficult.  They could tolerate pictures of customers up on the stage after the performance, but not during it.  Why does a North Korean restaurant not want you to take any pictures of any of the staff?  What have they got to hide?  It was interesting that to the outside world the whole place was run completely run by women.  There was not a man in sight, not at the front desk, not serving, not performing.  There was no male front of house at all.  Which is odd from a devoutly Confucian country – one that espouses the importance of a male heir – so they must be somewhere behind the scenes, pulling the strings.

The second issue was that during one of his conversations with the waitress towards the end of our meal James let slip that he lived in Seoul.  Everything changed after that.  The waitresses clammed up and kept their distance.  Westerners were fine to chat to, especially if they speak Korean.  Ones that lived south of Korea’s DMZ (Demilitarised Zone), definitely not.

These restaurants across Asia are run by the North Korean government, to earn foreign currency.  The waitresses have a fixed smile on their faces and tend to all have similar features. It has been reported that those that work in any one of these restaurants do not know of, or know very little of, other restaurants in the same chain, even if they are in Shanghai.  The women reportedly all come from strong party families from the capital Pyongyang, where for example there is electricity at night, so having it available here in Shanghai in the evenings would not cause too many questions, and as they all come from good North Korean families the possibility of defection or challenging the system is low. In addition their social circle is apparently confined to those who also work in their restaurant.

No photos, fixed smiles, lack of openness, fear of Seoul connections, cloned look…….It all had the feeling of a North Korean version of The Stepford Wives.