The New Year’s Korean festive dishes embrace varieties of rice-cakes like chalttok (glutinous rice cake), solkittok (steamed rice cake) and jolphyon (fancy rice cake) and special national dishes like ttokkuk (rice-cake soup), mung-bean pancake, roast meat, kangjong (fried glutinous rice cake), sujongkwa (fruit punch made of honey) and sikhye (sweet rice drink), all of which are handed down from old times. In the past, these festive dishes were called Sechan in all which implies food for treating New Year’s guests.

   Chairman Kim Jong Il visited the Okryu Restaurant to check on the preparation of the festive dishes to be served on the New Year’s day of Juche 56 (1967).

   An official showed him the menu which included Korean food like yakbap (boiled glutinous rice mixed with sugar, dates, chestnuts, pine-nuts, sesame oil, etc.), chalttok, Pyongyang cold noodle, mung-bean pancake and various kinds of sikhye and also some foreign food.

   Taking a close look at the menu, the Chairman said that the New Year’s food should be national cuisine unique to our country.

   In fact, the officials of Okryu Restaurant had thought that some foreign food would make the New Year’s table more colorful and had reflected it in the menu.

   Regretting their short thinking, they responded that the menu would be revised to national food.

   The Chairman said that it would be better to do so, and again emphasized that seasoned bracken, chalttok and the like were the favorite food enjoyed by our people on the New Year’s Day.

   Officials were deeply impressed by his lofty will to highly value the national cuisine among the holiday food.

   Afterwards, guests were served with 100% Korean dishes on holidays in public catering establishments like the Okryu Restaurant.