PUSAN, South Korea — Every night at 8 p.m., Roma Khachaturyan, a Russian-Armenian from Moscow who now lives in Korea, feeds a Siberian tiger named Cesar.
Khachaturyan coaxes the 198-kg cat from its pen into a smaller holding cage. And then, protected from its powerful paws, he enters the pen and begins tossing the tiger dead chickens and hunks of raw meat.
But there is something strange about Cesar's environment. The windows surrounding the tiger are not those of a zoo, but the Peninsula coffee shop in Hotel Lotte Pusan, a 43-story luxury hotel in South Korea's largest seaport. The cat spends its daylight hours dozing and his nights pacing and listening to the sounds of the city just outside its walls. It is nothing more than a diversion for diners sipping house red or mopping up egg yolk with their toast.