Last year a delegation of local chefs was sent by Kim to Naples and
Rome to learn the proper Italian techniques after their homegrown
efforts to mimic Italian cuisine were found by Kim to contain “errors”.
“We had to learn the intricacies of creating pizzas without the ingredients found in the West. The only ingredients we have are dog, cat and rat here in North Korea so we had to change a few things,” chef, Ill Fuk Yu, told Choson Sinbo newspaper.
In
the late 1990s Kim brought a team of Italian pizza chefs to North Korea
to instruct his army officers how to make pizza, a luxury which is now
being offered to a tiny elite able to afford such luxuries in a country
that cannot feed many of its 24 million inhabitants.
Because of the
food shortages dogs, cats and rats are
being incorporated to ensure the perfect Korean pizza is created every time.
“Our North Korean pizzas are the best in the world and are now better than Western pizzas,” the
manager of the Pyongyang eatery quoted Kim as saying, according to the
Tokyo-based Choson Sinbo newspaper.
The paper, which is often
seen as a mouthpiece for the communist regime, added the restaurant had
proved to be a major hit after it opened in the capital Pyongyang in
December.
“We got dog pizza, rat pizza and cat pizza. You can mix the ingredients if you wish. The pizza topping cheese is fermented from rats milk and is a North Korean delicacy. We love it here,” Jung Un-Suk, 42, told the newspaper, “They
have unique flavours,” she said.
