Hermit Kitchen How Did a North Korean Restaurant Wind Up in Northern Virginia?

The first thing you notice on the menu is what isn’t there: beef. It’s the essential feature of South Korean restaurants, particularly in barbecue form: beef ribs and bulgogi.

But Pyongyang Soondae—Pyongyang Sausage—isn’t a South Korean restaurant. It’s North Korean, so the menu skews toward seafood, poultry—and pork, pork, pork. The staple meat of the South is nowhere to be seen, except in a single soup dish. That would be naengmyun, the one northern dish every Korean knows, a buckwheat noodle soup with cucumbers and slices of beef, served cold, often with ice cubes in the broth.

Most Korean restaurants advertise “Pyongyang naengmyun” as a mark of authenticity, regardless of whether their chefs have ever been to the totalitarian-ruled city that serves as the soup’s namesake. Pyongyang Soondae does them one better, serving its version with balls of pheasant meat.

The authenticity might explain why the new restaurant stands out in a region already dense with eateries from the peninsula. For that often elderly chunk of the Korean immigrant population that traces their ancestry to the North, the spot is unique. Owner Ma Young-Ae has been advertising heavily in the local Korean press, both print and TV, since opening her restaurant last fall. Among the customers lunching on pork liver and intestines are Lim Sung-Il, 73, and his wife Hye-Gyung, 71, both of whom left Pyongyang as kids. Both made the trek from Maryland to Pyongyang Soondae’s storefront, lured by childhood culinary memories.

Sitting near the border of Alexandria and Fairfax County on Little River Turnpike—the restaurant-saturated main drag of Northern Virginia’s Korean community—the restaurant doesn’t tout its unlikely origins, at least not in English. Its only English-language sign, in the parking lot, features the name of the previous restaurant to occupy the narrow building. “Pyongyang Soondae” is written above it, in Korean.

Which makes it the perfect place to find a restaurant owned by a former spy and operated by North Korean defectors.

Clad in a red apron decorated with cats and hearts, Ma Young-Ae, 48, looks like the quintessential ajuma—a Korean woman who has settled comfortably into middle age and the privileges that accompany it: being bowed to, getting seated first on the bus, giving unsolicited advice to strangers. Her day revolves around restaurant work. By 9:30 in the morning, she’s shopping for supplies. She works until at least 10:30 each night. In her spare time, she listens to music and watches movies. She likes action flicks, especially those about the FBI.

A little more than a decade ago, Ma was an undercover agent for North Korea’s Ministry of Public Security, conducting drug investigations. Her job was to bust smugglers—farmers, mostly—who were exporting opium to China. It was an odd assignment, considering the North Korean government’s documented involvement in the drug trade itself: along with weapons and counterfeit “superdollars,” opium has been a key source of revenue for the cash-strapped regime. Ma says her job was a bit less righteous: She was tasked with busting smugglers operating without government approval.

Besides a slight North Korean accent—pronouncing ni as nei—there is little that would make Ma stand out among Northern Virginia’s large Korean community.

Until she gets to talking about politics, that is. A devout Christian with the zeal of a convert—she found Jesus in South Korea, where she lived after abandoning the atheist North—Ma is waging a missionary campaign against the state that once employed her. Her political activities are evident on the walls of her restaurant, decorated with pictures of her with Hillary Clinton and members of the South Korean parliament. She travels to New York frequently to lead protests at the offices of the North Korean ambassador to the United Nations, the only official North Korean delegation in the U.S. Last year, following North Korea’s controversial sinking of a South Korean naval vessel, she was back, waving a picket sign at the ambassador. She says a North Korean official pulled her aside to growl at her: “Where do you think you are, bitch?” she recalls, through an interpreter. “You just watch. We will kill you.”

Ma’s family was chosun saram—Korean-descended Chinese citizens who migrated from North Korea just before the peninsula’s partition. Most chosun saram settled in the Jilin Province of northeastern China. But Ma’s brother joined the northern army during the Korean War; the family followed him back in 1968, when Ma was five years old. Ma says her mother’s southern roots meant they were perpetually under suspicion. “I wanted to go to college,” she says, “but because of my mother, I didn’t have the opportunity.”

Instead, at 17, Ma joined the army, long the country’s dominant institution—and a place that offered opportunities unavailable elsewhere. A music lover who could play the piano and accordion as well as the yanggeum, a stringed instrument played with bamboo sticks, she wound up in the army’s musical wing, or Yesuldan, performing songs of tribute to the regime.