Our Man in Pyongyang (or rather, Hackensack)

Egan, who has run Cubby’s for twenty-five years, is well known in Hackensack, though not solely for the quality of his ribs. For nearly fifteen years, he has served as a kind of unofficial ambassador—a go-between and a gofer—for the government of North Korea. He is, as he puts it, “Kim Jong Il’s guy in New Jersey.” Dozens of photographs on his restaurant walls offer testimony to Egan’s improbable involvement in international diplomacy. Among the pictures of friendly Giants and Yankees are several images of besuited, slightly ill-at-ease-looking Asian men posing at Cubby’s. “That’s Minister Han, before he became Ambassador here,” Egan said to me, pointing to a youthful, bespectacled man in a blue suit. (Han Song Ryol, who joined North Korea’s U.N. delegation in 1993, ended his tenure as Ambassador last year and returned to Pyongyang.) “And that’s Ambassador Ho Jong.” (Ho left his post in 1994.) In another photograph, a gentleman with the same black hair and grin as Egan stands with a beaming young female athlete, Kye Sun Hui. “That’s my dad at the Atlanta Olympics, in ’96,” Egan said. “She won the judo title when she was just sixteen. She’s a hero in North Korea. She still asks about me.”

In one corner of the restaurant is a photograph showing a dreary skyline, shot from what looks like a viewing platform. “That’s Pyongyang,” Egan said. “That’s when they gave me my pin.” The pin to which he refers bears an image of Kim Il Sung, the father of North Korea’s Stalinist state, who died in 1994, and whose son is Kim Jong Il, its current leader. North Koreans wear similar pins as a sign of respect for their head of state. Egan keeps his pin in a small, cluttered back office at Cubby’s. “I’m told there are only two Westerners that have pins—me and some guy from Romania,” Egan said. “I got the pin at the end of my first trip. They inducted me into their family. They said, ‘You are part of us.’ I thought, When in Rome, I’m Roman.”