BEIJING — The agreement was hatched over a dinner of steak and cheesecake.

For more than a year, diplomatic talks over abolishing North Korea's nuclear-weapons program had languished. Prospects for breaking the silent deadlock seemed bleak. But a weekend meal between an American and a North Korean diplomat set the discussions on a fresh course.

So when North and South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States convene a meeting the week of July 25 to resume talks about turning the Korean Peninsula into a nuclear-free zone, the negotiations will be a test of the good faith expressed through a clinking of wine glasses after dinner.

"We had a toast to the future of the six-party talks," said one senior U.S. official who participated in the Saturday evening meal in the Chinese capital. "A toast to good progress at the six-party talks."

While the Bush administration is unmistakably pleased by North Korea's decision to rejoin talks that have been at a standstill since June 2004, the reaction stopped well short of elation given the complicated history of negotiating with the communist nation. North Korea is believed to have at least two — and perhaps more — nuclear weapons.

As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice left Beijing yesterday after meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao and other top officials, she struck a note of caution.

"It's a very good thing that we are going back to the talks, but it is only a start," Rice said. "It is not the goal of the talks to have talks. It is the goal of the talks to have progress."

In an interview with Fox News, Rice added pointedly, "We should not spend too much time celebrating the fact that we're going back to the talks." She said North Korea has a "bar to pass to show that it's really interested in and determined to give up its nuclear weapons."

Rice is scheduled to discuss the disarmament talks with her East Asian counterparts as she travels to Japan and South Korea today and tomorrow. She came to the region for the second time in less than four months, aides said, because she knew a deal was close to being reached and to show a high-level U.S. commitment to the discussions.

Three rounds of discussions among the six nations were held during 2003 and 2004. The talks, however, yielded limited progress in sizing up and ultimately dissolving North Korea's nuclear-weapons program.

But the landscape has changed for North Korea, which is struggling to cope with a lack of electricity and a growing food shortage. A senior Bush administration official said those were the two key ingredients in North Korea's seeming willingness to negotiate.

If North Korea agreed to dismantle its nuclear-weapons program, financial incentives would be offered as an inducement from neighboring South Korea and China.