Do you like seafood? How about eating seafood under water? You can at a place called “Under,” Europe’s first submerged restaurant
Hey everyone, welcome back to Plain English. I’m Jeff. JR is second in command: he’s the producer. Lately, I’ve been hearing from a lot of you on WhatsApp, and one thing people always say is, keep going, keep doing this. Of course we’re going to keep going! It’s as if you guys all think I’m on the verge of just quitting this. Listen, I can’t quit now, not after getting to know all of you, not after you’ve invited JR and I into your commutes, your kitchens, your workout routines. We’re not going anywhere. And if anything happens to me and I can’t continue, that’s why we have a second-in-command, JR.
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Today is episode 144, so you can find the full transcript of the episode at PlainEnglish.com/144. As always, the transcripts include translations from English into Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and French.
Undersea restaurant features Nordic food with a side of marine research
Europe’s first underwater restaurant is not in the gleaming blue waters off the southern coast of Spain or in the Greek islands. Instead, it’s on a rocky, windswept coast of southern Norway.
The restaurant is appropriately called “Under,” and it served its first meal on March 20. The 500 square-meter space will typically serve about 40 guests at a time. From their tables, diners are able to see seals, lobster, sea urchins, even tiny sharks pass by the restaurant’s enormous 11-meter-wide panoramic window. Going at night is no problem: the sea outside the windows is lit up, allowing a great view of the underwater world at any time of day. The restaurant’s creators say the view exposes you to the wonders beneath the sea.
And the restaurant is not just for serving meals: it’s actually involved in marine biology research. Under has partnered with the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomic Research, among other organizations. Having the building underwater allows researchers to study sea life for long periods at a time; there are cameras and other measurement instruments attached to the building. It is also built in such a way as to allow plant life and even mussels to attach to it, so the building truly becomes part of the underwater landscape.
I mentioned it’s a building. It’s not just a building—it’s like a bunker. You can’t just put any old building under water. In addition to the wear and tear the water will put on the structure, you also have to consider the water pressure at sixteen feet below the surface. What’s more, this is Norway, not the Virgin Islands. So the building has to withstand punishing weather: crashing waves, gusting winds, things like that. It weighs 2,500 tons and is designed to withstand even extreme weather events.
Here’s how they built it. First of all, the building is slightly curved, so it can withstand the waves a little better. The concrete walls are half a meter thick. The acrylic windows are 30 centimeters thick. Big, bulky windows—good idea with sharks outside, right? The structure itself is a relatively simple tube, laid down on an angle.
The structure was built six months ago on a barge. They then towed it into position. Once they got it to the right place, they had to submerge it into the water and anchor it to the sea bed. In order to get it down there—remember it’s a building, so it would be full of air—they had to put these huge containers full of water inside to weigh it down and displace as much air as possible, allowing the structure to sink. They anchored it to the sea with 18 huge bolts. One of the engineers on the project described it as a delicate operation, since they had to place the restaurant—a fully-constructed building—underwater within two inches of their plan in order to secure the bolts correctly.
You might be wondering, how do you get in and out? It’s quite simple: you walk in the front door. The building is sloping down from the rocky shore. So you enter on land, above the water, and walk down a sloping corridor to the main restaurant space below the water. Now that it’s in place, the restaurant looks like a long narrow building that slid off the rocky coast into the water. One of the architects described it this way. He said: “It’s just a concrete tube that brings people from the land down to the sea.”
Under is located in the town of Lindesnes, at Norway’s southern tip on the North Sea. The area is popular for tourists, since Norway’s oldest lighthouse is nearby. The operator of the restaurant also has a hotel nearby. The best way to get there is to take a quick flight from the capital, Oslo.
So this is all a lot of fun, but a restaurant is only as good as its menu, right? So let’s talk a little bit about what’s on the menu. It’s an eighteen-course tasting menu, so you get to sample a little bit of a lot of dishes. If you’ve ever been to a restaurant with a tasting menu, then you know that you don’t order your favorite dish, you actually get one of everything. On an eighteen-course tasting menu, you get eighteen small dishes, one after another. The menu will change with the seasons, but it will include seafood from the waters in the area.
For example, clams, kelp, cod, even Danish caviar were all on the menu recently. You’re also likely to see mushrooms, berries, and maybe wild sheep from the area. The Chef Nicolai Ellitsgaard says on his web site that “fresh ingredients” and “pure, naked flavors” are just as important as providing a “unique dining experience” to his guests. The tasting menu costs 2,250 Norwegian kroner, which is about $260 US dollars. A special wine pairing is extra, but if you don’t like wine, they’ll bring a juice pairing with your dishes instead. The restaurant is fully booked through the fall.
When I first read about this, I thought, “the southern tip of Norway? That can’t be too bad.” But there’s a reason the country is called Norway! The southern tip is actually about even with the very top of Scotland. Look at it on the map, the town name is Lindesnes. The web site, by the way, has some beautiful photography of both the restaurant and the surrounding area. The web site is easy—it’s just Under.no. Really beautiful pictures on there.
I want to say hi to a few listeners today. German from Santiago, Chile, connected on WhatsApp; he’s really into climbing and hiking and sent me some absolutely beautiful pictures from the mountains actually near the capital but also from Patagonia. Alfonso from Mexico City wanted to know if I’ve ever been to the Casa Azul, Frida Kahlo’s house in the Coyoacán neighborhood of the Mexican capital. Have I ever been? I’ve been twice! Actually JR and I went together one time. It’s a beautiful house and a really nice part of town. Also I wanted to say hi to Victor from El Salvador and Gustavo from Brazil, both of whom sent me voice messages.
Eduardo from Mexico—he lives in Sao Paulo now, though—Eduardo sent me a GIF from RuPaul’s Drag Race as an example of “raising eyebrows.” I thought that was clever!
Great stories make learning English fun
