Noodle bars in Laos offer special dish – a cash cow for Kim

North Korean diners of Laos are making a mint for Pyongyang, with reports restaurants are being run by intelligence agency the Reconnaissance General Bureau.

North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un. Picture: KCNA via KNS/AFP

Whatever is sustaining the Sindat BBQ North Korean restaurant, it is not the sale of noodles, kimchi and barbecued beef. All are on the menu, along with mushroom vodka, ginseng brandy and authentic Taedonggang beer brewed in North Korea. But on Sunday lunchtime the restaurant, in the town of Vang Vieng, in Laos, is all but deserted.

A single customer enjoys a bowl of cold noodles alone in a dining room with seating for 150 people. At the far side, drums, keyboards and guitars are set up for the all-female song and dance performances for which such North Korean establishments are known – but there is no show today.

Multiple signs ban photography; the waitresses, who confirm that they are from Pyongyang, will answer no further questions and give the impression of frank discomfort with the European asking them.

But food and entertainment are probably small parts of what this restaurant is doing here, in a quiet corner of a small town in one of the most obscure countries in southeast Asia.

Until a few years ago there were more than a hundred North Korean restaurants across China, Russia and southeast Asia – rare cultural outposts of one of the most repressive nations in the world. This changed after 2019, when it became mandatory for all United Nations members to send home North Korean workers under sanctions agreed in the UN security council. The rationale was that, rather than going to their families, money earned by North Korean workers was siphoned off by Kim Jong-un’s regime for its own purposes, including the development of ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads.

However, five years on, in an atmosphere of increasing confrontation between Russia and China on one side and US allies on the other, sanctions are fraying and North Koreans continue to earn foreign currency across the world.

The last report by the panel monitoring sanctions concluded that in 2023 there were 100,000 North Korean workers employed overseas, earning about $500 million for Pyongyang. The panel, which was closed down by Russian veto this year, said that there appeared to be restaurants in five countries, including Russia.

The Times visited four of them over the weekend, including the Sindat BBQ in Vang Vieng and three more in the Laos capital, Vientiane.

The Laos government, in its mandatory report to the UN, insisted that all such businesses had been transferred to local owners. The monitoring panel notes that this “could be a sanctions evasion tactic” – as a fellow communist state, Laos enjoys good relations with North Korea. In any case, permitting North Korean workers is itself a failure to enforce sanctions.

In recording the findings of one, unidentified member state, the experts said: “[North Korean] restaurants reportedly generate $700 million in revenue for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) annually ... [and] launder money for the country.”

The report also said that the restaurants were run by the Reconnaissance General Bureau, the North Korean intelligence agency responsible for covert operations overseas – suggesting that its business extends wider than food and beverages.

A clue lies in the building next to the Sindat BBQ restaurant, which bears the words English Korean Computer Academy Daokham School. When I ask a woman in the residential building next door if I may enrol in a class, I am briskly escorted off the premises.

One of North Korea’s big money earners is its skilled IT workers, who do legitimate and illegitimate work. In a notice to businesses in September, the British government warned: “It is almost certain that UK firms are currently being targeted by DPRK information technology workers disguised as freelance third-country IT workers to generate revenue for the DPRK regime.”

An unknown number of the North Korean IT specialists are in Laos, and the men who oversee them run the restaurants. Before their notional transfer to a local owner, according to the UN panel, the restaurants in Vientiane were run by two men who were sanctioned by South Korea last year for “assisting in earning foreign currency through illegal financial activities”.

If this is correct, then the restaurants are a front for far more profitable and nefarious activities. It suggests that the real business of the Sindat BBQ is in the computer “school” next door, and that the remote location and absence of customers are the point of the whole exercise.