This little restaurant isn’t much to look at. It sits across the street from an empty lot. Boxes of dried fish are stacked by the front window. A dirty mop stands in the corner. But people come to eat here from all over South Korea. They come for the potato pancakes and blood sausage—food that reminds them of home.

North Korea and South Korea used to be one country. Then Japan took control of the Korean peninsula in 1910. When Japan was defeated in World War 2, Korea was split in two. North Korea established a communist government like Russia’s. South Korea adopted a democracy like the one in the United States. In the years since the split, the South has flourished. The North has struggled.

North Korea’s struggle was particularly hard during the 1990s. The North suffered  from a widespread famine. Hundreds of thousands of people died.

Today, more than 30,000 North Koreans live in the South. Some fled poverty and hunger. Others wanted to escape communism and live in a more free society. But in over 70 years since the split, the two Koreas have become very different places.

Imagine having to leave the country you grew up in. People in the place you move to have different ways of living and eating. You speak the same language, but no one understands your accent. Wouldn’t you miss home? North Koreans do too.

Life was hard in North Korea. But life is not easy for refugees when they escape either. This restaurant gives them comfort—on a plate.

 “This is the taste of where they came from,” says the restaurant’s owner, Ms. Choi. “The food here tastes the way it does in North Korea.” Ms. Choi gave her little restaurant a big name: Howol-ilga. In English, that means, “People from Different Homelands Come to Gather in One Place.”

All Koreans are welcome at Howol-ilga. But Ms. Choi says a South Korean could never become a cook in her kitchen. She needs workers who know and love North Korean food—and can share that love with customers.

 “Our lives here can be so difficult,” says a North Korean now living in the South. “But finding that restaurant made me so happy.”