Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi (left) shakes hands with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il as they meet for talks in Pyongyang on May 22. JAPAN OUT REUTERS/Japan Pool

The bottled mineral water he drinks is the regular North Korean “Sindok” brand, but comes from a dedicated spring.

Early on, Kim Jong-il realized that there was a whole world of taste out there beyond his country’s borders. In 1977, he reportedly had his overseas embassies gather samples of foreign cigarette brands. After personal research, he narrowed his preference down to Rothmans and Dunhill. He finally opted for Rothmans. Rather than import, in revolutionary Juche fashion, he arranged for the production of a similar-tasting local brand called “Paektusan,” the North’s English spelling at the time for Mt. Paekdu (san means “mountain” in Korean). But not all quality items can be reproduced so easily. Some years ago a representative for Hennessy confirmed for me that Kim Jong-il was the company’s biggest single customer for its Paradis cognac.

Kim was apparently spending around US$700,000 a year on it. (Interestingly, my informant explained, Paradis purchasing patterns offer an indicator of political stability. Higher sales usually mean an increase in gift-giving by the leader to key people to keep them sweet. In other words, an increase in sales equals a rise in political nervousness.)

In recent years, Kim has made efforts to improve his health. He tried to quit smoking in 1982 and finally managed to do it in 1999. Typically, all the top military commanders followed suit.

He was a heavy drinker until he was 50, when his doctors finally persuaded him to drop the hard liquor.2 He now drinks half a bottle of red wine a day. His preferences are Bordeaux and Burgundy; for the Russia trip in 2001, he had a consignment delivered to the train from Paris.

The pampering is perhaps to be expected of an East Asian dictator. Food has long been an obsession for Koreans — “have you eaten rice today?” used to be the common greeting in the South — and they are among the world’s big consumers of exotic parts of exotic animals. We should not be surprised, then, that Kim Jong-il is something of a foodie fusspot.

He’s not the kind of leader who would slurp a bowl of noodles with the workers, but then nor is he the type to slip an apron on and start flipping his own pancakes. He defers to outside experts, and, having got over his kidnapping phase, he prefers to hire them. A few years ago, North Korean officials hired two Italian chefs to make pizzas for Kim Jong-il and teach the locals how to do it. Their story highlights Kim Jongil’s luxurious lifestyle.

Presently we came to an enormous gate at the end of an avenue with a guard inside a building. A green light flashed on the hood of the car and the gate rose.

The guard made a kind of queer waving gesture at us as we passed and suddenly we found ourselves inside a magnificent park with trees and flower beds and fountains and manicured lawns surrounding a strange building made up of two square shaped wings, each about 150 meters long. One of the wings was four floors high, the other was lower and had no windows at all; the two wings were connected by [a] narrow lower structure. There were no signs in this hotel, no reception counter, no room keys.

This was one of Kim’s palaces. Life wasn’t all peacocks and croquet, though. On one occasion, Kim Jong-il or some of his guests, dining on a pleasure boat, complained about the food prepared by his Italian chefs.

That evening we had a light dinner back at the base: a pair of lobsters, salad and French white wine. The phone rang. Mr Om put down his glass of Remy Martin which we had been downing by the bucketful and went to answer. It was always a stressful moment for him: his daily progress report and communicating the preparations for the next day. Suddenly the expression on Mr Om’s face darkened visibly as he listened in silence to who I think must have been Mr Pak on the other end complaining that the food had not met with approval.

After our wives had been sent scuttling to bed, the Chef and I were led into an office and subjected to a classic brainwashing session. Actually, the problem hadn’t been the pizza at all, but the lamb. It had been allowed to marinate for two days. This was followed by the immense labor of preparing the garnish with little bundles of dried spaghetti which I had tasted myself. It was really an exquisite dish, visually stunning, but, alas, somebody had found it too salty. So that night until one o’clock we were obliged to stay up and revise the entire program, with Mr Om removing anything that was deemed too salty.

Konstantin Pulikovskiy’s account of Kim Jong-il’s 2001 cross- Russia train ride also provides some insight into this fussiness. Kim Jong-il brought along North Korean chefs trained in France who were able to rustle up Korean, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and French dishes. Kim and Pulikovskiy discussed the menu every day. Lobsters and other fresh food were flown in at four points on the journey. Kimchi, the spicy Korean side dish, was a staple. Kim explained to his host that the strong seasoning in kimchi provided a necessary substitute for an enzyme needed for digestion which only the Koreans, among homo sapiens, lack. (Such myths are commonplace among Koreans. Another is that Koreans were relatively unaffected by the SARS virus that swept through East Asia in 2003 because they were protected by kimchi.)

Kim Jong-il may be a bit of a germophobe. In Khabarovsk in 2001, he was taken to a milk processing plant, where he was invited to taste the cottage cheese and vitamin-enriched milk. He declined, which was a little rude.

However, it would be a mistake to assume that Kim Jong-il is a pig. He’s a gourmet, not a glutton. He enjoys the flavors and textures of food, and eats in modest portions. In St. Petersburg, the local governor, alerted by Pulikovskiy to Kim’s preferences, served up salted pork fat, pelmen (dumplings) and pickled cucumbers — an appetizer which he clearly enjoyed, for he recalled it several times afterwards.

“Chairman Kim’s table was filled with expensive dishes from around the world,” Kim Jong-il’s former Japanese chef, Kenji Fujimoto, told the Japanese daily Sankei Shimbun. “He enjoyed rich sushi such as toro, made with delicate tuna-belly flesh, and uni, sea-urchin egg sushi.”5 He is apparently so partial to shark- fin soup that he’ll have it up to three times a week. Fujimoto said that in mid-summer, Kim Jong-il, following Korean tradition, likes to eat boshintang, dog soup. In his forties, he was instructed by East German doctors to lose weight. Over a couple of months in 1980, he ran up and down the steps in front of his house, with his son and nephew in tow, and lost 20 kilos. But he soon put it back on.

Modest portions notwithstanding, Kim Jong-il remains a chubby fellow. To be more precise, in North Korea he is the chubby fellow. He’s the only Fat Bastard in the whole country. What makes his lifestyle so revolting is that, while he’s been sticking his beak into glasses of Burgundy and moaning about the lamb, 10 percent of his country’s population has died of famine.