Strutting With Some Barbecue Diplomacy

A new book, Eating With the Enemy: How I Waged Peace With North Korea From My BBQ Shack in Hackensack, is a juicy read.

Bobby Egan, center, with North Korean diplomats at his restaurant in 2006.
Courtesy of Robert Egan.

If it seems unlikely that a delegation of North Korean diplomats once attended a Nets game and received a shout-out from the arena announcer at halftime, well, it was just a warmup in the even more improbable but equally real tale of Bobby Egan, long-time Hackensack restaurateur and self-appointed liaison to the D.P.R.K—the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, they of George W. Bush’s “axis of evil.”

In his funny, eye-opening, and compulsively readable new book (out April 27), Eating With the Enemy: How I Waged Peace With North Korea From My BBQ Shack in Hackensack (St. Martins, $25.99), Egan (and writer Kurt Pitzer) explain how the cocky roofer’s son from the toughest streets of Fairfield grew up admiring wiseguys but found out he could never be made on account of being Italian only on his mother’s side. So despite some drug problems and scrapes with the law, he cleaned up his act and went legit. For the last 28 years, Egan has run Cubby’s BBQ, just down River Street from the Bergen County Courthouse.

Egan wanted to fight in the Vietnam War, but it ended when he was just 17. The plight of prisoners of war and the missing-in-action seized his attention. In the early ’80s he got in touch with the Vietnamese mission to the United Nations in New York, and slowly developed a relationship that eventually enabled him to broach the subject of POWs. He befriended Le Quang Khai, a Vietnamese diplomat doing graduate studies at Columbia University, and when Le defected, in 1992, he held his press conference at Cubby’s. Egan that same year testified before the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA affairs.

The North Koreans evidently were paying attention, because the next year they contacted him—from their diplomatic mission to the U. N.—to set up a meeting. Frozen out from official contacts with Americans, they were looking for friendship, a liaison, in the hopes of eventually normalizing relations. Egan befriended them, inviting them to dinner at Cubby’s, taking them to the Nets game in 1993 and on hunting and fishing trips, eventually making several trips to Pyongyang and arranging the delivery of humanitarian aid. The North Korean people, he says, “are suffering well beyond what even I could have imagined.”

The FBI took an immediate interest in Egan’s relationship with the North Koreans. They buttonholed him early, letting him know they expected him to funnel information to them, which he did (with, he says, the knowledge of the North Koreans).Over the course of thirteen years, Egan became close with U.N. Ambassador Han Song Ryol, until Han returned to Pyongyang in 2006. “I never imagined writing a book,” he says, “until Bush labeled the North Koreans part of the ‘axis of evil,’ and I realized that so few Americans know how far the North Koreans went to normalize relations with us. I want people to understand these are human beings.”

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