North Korea’s State-Run Airline Becomes Notorious for ‘Mystery Meat’ Burger
By Khier Casino
Airline food can be pretty unappetizing, but North Korea’s stare-run airline takes the cake for serving its passengers only one food item: the Koryo Burger.
Travelers do not know whether it’s undercooked chicken or some kind of mystery meat, but the meal aboard Air Koryo is always served cold on a paper doily.
“The Air Koryo burger was the worst example of soft power I’ve ever tasted,” Alec Ash, a Beijing-based writer, told the Los Angeles Times.
Along with the unidentified piece of meat comes a slice of processed cheese, some shredded cabbage or lettuce and a blob of sweet, brown sauce all stacked in a stale bun.
“The meat was inoffensively dull and, true to the intrigue that surrounds it, even tougher to identify than it was to chew,” Vice journalist Jamie Fullerton said in a review.
But some passengers can’t get enough of the taste of the Koryo Burger, according to airline review site Skytrax.
“Their famous Air Koryo burger was a very tasty snack and I would have eaten another,” one traveler said. “All in all, a very pleasant experience.”
North Korean tour operator Simon Cockerell, who has booked a flight with Air Koryo hundreds of times, claims the patties are actually pretty decent, and that people just flip out when they encounter a foreign dish on a state-run airline.
“I think it’s just that North Korea, to tourists, is so inherently sinister and funny at the same time,” he told the LA Times. “That ‘Oh, my God, it’s a burger!’ — that’d be an absurd reaction on any other airline. But on Air Koryo, it’s a normal thing to do.”
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