A more critical account comes from pizza chef Furlanis, who published a three-part memoir in magazines about a stint in North Korea in 1997.
Furlanis was alternately appalled and fascinated by the luxuriousness of the walled seaside compound where he worked. The kitchen, he says, was a vast, white-tiled room equipped with the finest appliances, as antiseptically clean as an operating room and as reverently hushed as a church. It was, in short, a temple of gastronomy.
"I doubt if even Federico Fellini could have concocted something of this magnitude," Furlanis wrote.
Furlanis' job was not only to cook for Kim, but to teach North Korean cooks how to replicate his efforts. The eager North Koreans even used a ruler to measure the distance between the olives on a pizza.
During his three weeks in North Korea, Furlanis glimpsed Kim only from afar. Furlanis' minders never uttered Kim's name aloud but referred cryptically to a very important guest who, Furlanis was admonished, didn't want his food too salty and hated anchovies on his pizza.
Nevertheless, Furlanis and other cooks were treated as honored guests. They were paid well, lavishly wined and dined, and pampered in much the same style as Kim himself.
"Every now and then, a kind of courier would show up from some corner of the world. I saw him twice unloading two enormous boxes containing an assortment of 20 very costly French cheeses and one box of prized French wines," Furlanis wrote. "That evening, dinner -- a feast worthy of Petronius' 'Satyricon' -- was served with an excellent Burgundy."
Nonetheless, Furlanis objected that all the wine came from France. Three days later, a courier brought a shipment of Barolo wines from Italy.
