I Made Pizza for Kim Jong-il

As a former South Korea expat, I am always on the lookout for travel stories about the reclusive regime of North Korea. Americans aren’t allowed to travel there (unless you count a jaunt into the northern half of the negotiation building at the Panmunjom DMZ), and other nationals making the visit are usually restricted to heavily monitored tours of Pyongyang.

Thus, I was delighted to find an online article called “I Made Pizza for Kim Jong-Il” by Ermanno Furlanis, an Italian chef. This story (which contains a second and third installment) recounts Furlanis’s experience of teaching a group of North Korean military chefs how to make pizza that would satisfy the notoriously finicky tastes of dictator Kim Jong-Il. In the process, the Italian chef recounts his heavily guarded travel inside North Korea, noting surreal scenes in the countryside (people asleep at night in the middle of the road) as well as inside the city (goats and ducks tethered at the foot of space-age skyscrapers in Pyongyang).

One of the most charming scenes comes when Furlanis shakes his minders and gets into a soccer game with some villagers on a North Korean island. “There was a dreamlike quality about the whole situation,” he reports. “We had a football to play with and an afternoon’s enjoyment ahead. After a few moments it felt like just any Sunday afternoon in any Italian football stadium. We were having fun just like little kids while the fans on the sidelines cheered their teams on.” Another time, Furlanis and his wife demand the chance to go out and go dancing in Pyongyang, so his minder takes him to a huge public square where 30,000 people have assembled for a patriotic dance. “We clasped hands with a ring of dancers,” he writes, “and had a wonderful time while they playfully reproached us for getting all the steps wrong. It turned out to be an unforgettable evening. They had really won us over.”

Apart from the small human moments, a question looms: What kind of pizza do North Koreans like? Apparently, it was pizza al salamino, “which, in the wake of its success in the United States, is in the process of establishing itself as nothing less than an international cult, a pizza without borders, which is appreciated in every land no matter the ideology or regime, a dish which could help reconcile the most irreconcilable differences.

“The next Israeli-Palestinian summit meeting,” Furlanis adds, “should be held in a pizzeria in the portici district of Naples.”