James T. Areddy/The Wall Street Journal

The entrance to Shanghai’s D.P.R Korean Restaurant

North Korean restaurants in China offer a rare and somewhat surreal opportunity for outsiders to interact with citizens of the hermit kingdom.

Flag pins usually give away the fact that a Korean restaurant serves cuisine of the north, instead of the south. The authentic northerners wear the blue-and-red pins on their chests, keep their opinions focused on the food and offer minimal personality during the requisite dinner-time performance that accompanies a barbeque meal.

News Monday of the death of Kim Jong Il appeared to leave some of China’s North Korean restaurateurs in shock, though it was exhibited in different ways.

In the Shanghai district Hongqiao, the glass façade of the almost-clinically clean D.P.R Korean Restaurant displays intertwined Korean and Chinese flags, plus Santa Claus. But the mood Monday was far from jolly inside the suddenly and indefinitely closed establishment.

A lone woman in a black sweater – presumably the manager – sat sobbing at the table furthest from the door. With a vacant stare and warming her hands on a cup of tea, the woman’s eyes were puffy and red. The noise of would-be patrons brought four younger women out from a back room. All were wearing traditional choson-ot and likewise had moist eyes and sullen faces.

A question about Kim was met with a single word in Chinese from one of the young women: “Leave.”

At kilometer or so away at another Shanghai restaurant, Pyongyang KoRyo, it was all bustle. Staff wearing expressions as bright as their pink choson-ot smiled as they confirmed themselves to be North Korean while offering to seat guests.

But the elegant young woman in charge drew a firm line at questions, even as she bowed to her inquisitive new arrivals.

At the mention of Kim’s name, she reflexively dropped her gaze and lifted her finger to her lips with a motion – a demand – to hush.

“Shi jia-de,” she said in Mandarin: “It is fake.”

A gentle press for more explanation was met with a whispered but firm request to go. “This news has not been delivered to us. If you are going to ask about that please leave,” she said pointing to the winding stairway that leads to the street. The buzz of young waitresses – a half dozen of whom had earlier said they were from the north – suggested they indeed may not have been told.

Outside Pyongyang KoRyo after the lunch rush, two Korean men in track suits manned the entrance and declined to speak, shooing two young workers back inside when a reporter approached. Minutes later one of the men guided five or six of the waitresses, some wearing identical winter jackets, out of the restaurant and down the street, moments before arrival of a television crew.

Beijing-based users of the popular Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo reported similar scenes at North Korean restaurants in the capital.

Weibo user He Jianye wrote that he was halfway through lunch at an unspecified North Korean restaurant in the city when the waitresses suddenly started to weep – “each crying up a storm” – and the restaurant was temporarily closed.

Another user, He Huafeng, said he went to Beijing’s Pyongyang Mudanfeng, where waitresses, some red-eyed and holding back tears, were wearing black aprons on top of their usual work outfits. “After we finished eating, we were told to go out the back door. The front door was shut with a sign saying ‘temporarily closed.”

– James T. Areddy. Follow him on Twitter @jamestareddy