The guidebook, entitled “Eating Out in Pyongyang,” was written jointly by three foreigners who have lived in North Korea, including Peruvian-born Roberto Christen, whose five-year stint in the country with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) ended last year.

Dinner at the Yanggakdo International Hotel in Pyongyang. Front the front right, going clockwise: steamed pigs feet in peanut and mustard sauce, cake, steamed conch, rice cakes, green-lentil jelly, and seasoned vegetables. In between the dishes are bottles of wine and blueberry alcohol.

The book, which is not for sale commercially and distributed only to several hundred acquaintances, introduces about 50 of Pyongyang’s diverse restaurants that are frequented by foreigners living in the closed country and by the nation’s elite. It lists Pyongyang’s famous restaurants, where one can sample the exquisite tastes of both East and West, like hamburgers, hotdogs, and American-style pancakes, Japanese sushi, Chinese shark-fin soup and flying-fish egg salad, as well as Korean naeng-myeon (cold buckwheat noodles), bibimbap (rice with mixed vegetables), and all kinds of vegetable dishes.

The book introduced the Pirobong Restaurant in the Pyongyang Hotel as one of the best in the city, saying one can taste perfect buffet cuisine there. The restaurant at the Maranbong Hotel, meanwhile, has an English-language menu with pictures, and one can enjoy vegetable tempura, clam soup, and vegetable omelets while listening to “soft music, rather than revolutionary songs.”

It also lists the Yanggakdo Revolving Restaurant, where one can eat in style as he or she takes in Pyongyang’s downtown scenery during the two hours and 56 minutes that the eatery takes to make a full 360 degree rotation.

The writers mentioned that in the hotel restaurants, one could find English-speaking staff, and added that all the food prices are paid in Euros.

Robert Koehler, internetnews@chosun.com