Europe’s first underwater restaurant awaits visitors

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For the chef and diners alike, each meal beneath the waves at Europe’s first underwater restaurant is a thing of wonder.

“We have this small window next to the kitchen and every time some special kind of fish comes by, I always start thinking about how it would taste,” says chef Nicolai Ellitsgaard.

The aptly named new restaurant Under opened a few weeks ago in Lindesnes on Norway’s southern tip.

It serves up Poseidon’s delicacies in an architectural showpiece that stretches down five metres (15 feet) underwater, offering a unique close-up of ocean life.

From the outside, the giant concrete monolith juts out from the craggy shoreline, while its other end tips down into the North Sea.

Customers enter the restaurant onshore through a wood-paneled passage and descend down a long, oak staircase into a dimly lit dining room. Here, a gigantic plexiglass underwater window takes center stage.

The 36-square-meter (398-square-foot) window — “like a sunken periscope” in the words of its designers — offers a panoramic view of the ever changing live aquatic show