North Korea, which often struggles to feed its own people, is making millions feeding foreigners.

Entities linked to Kim Jong-un’s pariah state run an expanding empire of restaurants abroad, complete with singing and dancing waitresses in traditional dress. They cater to tourists and businesspeople, many of them South Koreans, and they pump badly needed hard-currency profits back to the communist North, which is largely cut off from the world economy by sanctions over its nuclear weapons program.

(Because the restaurants handle a lot of cash, they are also suspected of being a convenient conduit for laundering money from some of the North’s sanctions-busting activities.)

There are about 130 of the restaurants, most of them in China, though also in Southeast and South Asia and a few farther afield, in Russia, Mongolia and even the Netherlands. Many are named Pyongyang after the North’s capital. Their menus often feature a specialty of the city, cold noodle, along with many variations on kimchi and, in some Asian locations at least, dog-meat soup.

The North Korean waitresses are said to be thoroughly screened for loyalty and carefully watched by security agents, but there have been reports that some have tried to defect. When that happens, evidently, the restaurant may be swiftly shut down and the rest of the staff shipped home.

The Pyongyang chain hit the headlines in February when the South Korean government, eager to step up pressure on the North after a provocative missile test, urged its citizens to stop patronizing the restaurants when they travel.