culture

Paek Kun Sil and U Yun Song are the best cooks among those at the Okryu Restaurant, a public catering service base on the banks of the picturesque Taedong River.

Proficient cook 

Paek Kun Sil, who has been working at the restaurant for over 20 years since her girlhood after graduating from the then Pyongyang foodstuff and cooking college, is a renowned cook who can make any dish skilfully.

The leader of the cooking workteam has devoted all her thinking, passion and labour to processing dishes.

So, she swiftly presents any foods, be they meat, vegetable and fish dishes, which are perfect in flavour and pleasing to the eye, once she picks up necessary materials.

Since two years after she began to work as a cook, she has taken part in various cooking festivals and cuisine contests every year to take first place more than ten times. She invented new tasty dishes like sturgeon fin soup and sturgeon tendon soup.

“Cooking is art and science. Excellent dishes come of much effort and sincerity devoted to processing,” Paek always tells her workteam members. 

According to her fellow cooks, Paek has the special ability to make mung-bean pancake, one of the four famous foods of Pyongyang favoured by the Korean people. They say they are no match to her in making yellowish and crisp mung-bean pancake that tastes and smells nice. 

She was awarded the title of master cook in March 2023.

Master hand at fish dishes

U Yun Song in his early forties has unusual skills in fish cooking.

His yardsticks for dishes are those that are good for digestion, that fully satisfy nutritional requirements and that are appealing to the eye.

His specialities include cold steamed sturgeon, soy sauce steamed sturgeon, roast eel, cold steamed catfish and rainbow trout hard-boiled with fragrant vegetables.

Among them, soy sauce steamed sturgeon is in great demand.

The food is prepared by pouring the warm oil sauce soaked with the aroma of Welsh onion over a slightly-salted and steamed sturgeon and served by garnishing it with coriander. It is an haute cuisine with the unique mixed flavour of soy sauce and coriander penetrating into the white tender flesh.

Saying that it is one of the cooking recipes to keep the standard time in steaming the fish, U Yun Song added that if the time is exceeded even a bit, sturgeon flesh becomes tough to spoil the taste.

He has won several top diplomas and gold medals at annual cooking festivals since 2013.

In April this year, he presented lobster jelly and fruit salad to the 27th national cooking festival to be highly appreciated by the jury.