At the Vladivostok restaurant, there is little to suggest any connection with the regime just 428 miles distant. No pictures of the Kim Il-Sung grace the walls, no slogans stamped out in shrill red Korean script. Instead, the décor excels in a sort of kitschy chinoiserie: the walls of one room are covered with naturalistic motifs -- golden autumn leaves and towering cliffs -- complete with a fake tree that "emerges" from the painted-on scene. Overlooking my booth was a framed poster of a woman looking out coyly from behind a large fan, the Chinese character for "double happiness" inscribed on every second blade.

North Korean government-run restaurants have existed for years in China, in regions adjacent to the DPRK's northern border, but in the past decade the business has truly gone global. In 2002, a branch of the Pyongyang restaurant chain opened in the Cambodian tourist hub of Siem Reap -- the first outside China -- and it became an immediate hit with South Korean tour groups visiting the nearby temples of Angkor. The success of the restaurant, which featured a nightly song and dance show by the North Korean waitresses, led to the opening of a second branch in Siem Reap and a third in the capital Phnom Penh in 2003. Since then, branches have also opened in Thailand, Laos, Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Nepal, Dubai and, soon, apparently, Amsterdam.

As North Korea's economic situation becomes increasingly dire, the number of branches has increased. A chain of mid-tier restaurants might not seem like much of a way to fund a government, but for the sanctions-stricken, technologically backward DPRK, every penny counts. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the death of Kim Il-Sung in 1994, North Korea found fewer communist countries to trade with, more capitalist democracies abhorred at its domestic abuses, and before long was in a state of severe economic crisis. Both Russia and China demanded that Pyongyang pay for imports in hard currency, rather than at advantageous "friendship" prices. Ravaged by famine and with its heavy industries in precipitous decline, the regime had little choice but to open "capitalist" foreign ventures -- including, eventually, restaurants -- to make up funding shortfalls.

"North Korea is not capable of producing anything of sellable quality," Andrei Lankov, a Korea expert and professor at Seoul's Kookmin University, told me. "They can sell some stuff like seafood, medical herbs, special types of mushrooms. But you are not going to run an economy on mushrooms."

The end result has been a plethora of overseas cash businesses, many of dubious legality, that prop up the North's moribund economy. Bertil Lintner, author of Great Leader, Dear Leader: Demystifying North Korean Under the Kim Clan, said that, along with kitschy restaurants, North Korea relies on such revenue-raising techniques as the sale of second-hand mobile phones and a suspected traffic in illicit drugs. But the Pyongyang Café might not be such an innocent venture.