I love it, but I’m almost too scared to think about eating there. Image: Snøhetta

Snøhetta, a Norwegian architecture firm, has made a dream slash nightmare I never knew I had come to life: they’re building Europe’s first underwater restaurant that will also function as a research center. It’s called Under and I think I want to move there. I definitely want to eat there. Maybe.


Time reports that the restaurant will have three levels—a “wardrobe area” for guests, then a champagne bar, then the dining room, located on the seabed, with a 36-foot panoramic window that looks out into the North Sea. From above, the restaurant looks like a beached whale, but in a nice, architectural, Northern European way.

It’s just sleeping. Image: Snøhetta


The walls of the restaurant are three feet thick and made of concrete, in order to sustain the choppy waters of the North Sea; that giant window that is the scariest and most exciting part of this endeavor is made of acrylic. Speaking to CNN, lead architect Rune Grasdal said “One of the benefits of this building is how it links nature and land, and how you can come safe from the land and in a very dramatic way go down through this concrete tube to the nature at sea level, and experience what normally is not experienced.”

Mr. Grasdal is correct—this is a “very dramatic way” to “experience what normally is not experienced,” but it could also be a very fascinating and fun way to die? A happy death, maybe, floating like a little sea otter amongst the kelp and the barnacles, before succumbing to lack of oxygen and the brisk cold of the North Sea, but death just the same.

Construction on Under will begin next year and the restaurant itself will open sometime in 2019. I will be there.

