When Nicolai Ellitsgaard goes to work, he starts by descending a long wooden staircase. The 32-year-old Dane is a chef in a restaurant more than 5 metres below sea level.
The unusual establishment in Lindesnes, an hour south of Kristiansand on Norway’s south coast, is called Under — which, by happy coincidence, also means “miracle” in Norwegian.
Owners Gaute and Stig Ubostadare say that, in a sense, that’s exactly what their restaurant is.
“Hardly anyone expected there to be an underwater restaurant up here in the north,” says Stig. “In that sense, it’s a miracle.”
Chef Ellitsgaard didn’t have to think twice when he was offered a job here a little over two years ago. “When I saw the pictures of the restaurant and they told me I could do what I wanted in the kitchen, I immediately asked: Where do I sign?” he says.
Under opened at the beginning of April and has been impressing punters not only with its food, but with its architecture. From the outside, it looks a bit like a sinking concrete shoebox.
Only one small part sticks out of the water. This space, with its wooden interior decor, is where customers enter the restaurant and hang their coats. Then, they descend a long oak staircase to the dining room, which has one wall made entirely of glass. The room is lit with blue-green tones to mimic the atmosphere of the ocean.
The building was designed by the Norwegian architectural firm Snohetta, which is also known for the Oslo Opera House and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt.
“Even for us, it was something completely new,” says architect Kjetil Traedal Thorsen. The biggest challenge was the foundations.
Normally, a building’s foundations would have to support a lot of weight. In this case, it was the opposite — the building wanted to float upwards. So it had to be fastened to the ground.
The hollow concrete body was cast on a raft on the opposite side of the bay. When it was finished, it was then pulled across to be put in place on the rocky bay.
“When you see the building for the first time, it looks as though it was put there accidentally,” says Traedal Thorsen.
“But of course, very precise calculations were made as to where the foundations could be established and where access could be enabled from the land via a bridge,” he adds.
In order to submerge a building into the sea, you have to fill it with water. Only when it had been secured to the foundations could the water inside be removed again. The building is now so watertight, it could withstand the storm of the century, Traedal Thorsen says.
Brothers Gaute and Stig Ubostad say they feel lucky to have found an architectural firm that allowed them to have fun and experiment.
“This was a project that had to evolve,” says Stig. “The result we have today no longer has much to do with the initial idea of 2011.”
In contrast to other underwater restaurants, in Lindesnes, functional rooms such as the kitchen, wine cellar and toilets are also underwater.
Ubostad says the almost 40-square-metre window to the sea is like a stage where customers can observe fish, crabs, mussels, algae and diving eider ducks.
The outside of the building has been designed so that mussels and sea snails will attach themselves to it. A marine biologist was on hand throughout the building process to ensure that as little damage as possible was done to the surrounding marine environment.
The brothers say part of their motivation is to inspire curiosity about marine life.
Chef Ellitsgaard, for one, is a huge fan of sea creatures. Once a week, he puts on his waterproof fishing trousers and wades out into the sea to harvest algae — an important part of the menu.
Oarweed is his favourite algae. “It tastes a bit like liquorice and we use it in a lot of dishes — we make stock from it, roast it, process it into a paste or serve it with cheese and bread.”
He and the eight other chefs he shares the kitchen with enjoy cooking with the “hidden treasures” of the sea, he says.
“These are things you wouldn’t normally use, like spring crayfish, limpets or the heads and roe of ling fish, which are usually just thrown back into the sea.”
The 18-course menu, which begins with a starter of limpet parfait, comes at a price: Around US$260 per head, without wine. But that isn’t stopping guests from flocking to the place, which as of late April was already booked up until the end of September.
Around 7,500 people had already made a reservation, with several hundred requests coming in every day.
The hope is that a restaurant tester will dine there one day; an underwater restaurant can still aim for the stars — Michelin stars, that is.
“We have a team in the kitchen that has experience in restaurants with one, two and three Michelin stars,” says Ubostad.
“Even if we don’t have such a big focus on it now, I still hope it will happen eventually,” he says. – dpa
