If you’ve always thought it would be super fun to have dinner surrounded by sharks, jellyfish and schools of fish, Under The Sea is for you! Their darkened restaurant filled with screens showing underwater scenes is quite the trip, and the food is… Well, let’s see.

It’s not often a restaurant has no windows and lighting that’s either very dark or animated like a fairground ride. Welcome to Under The Sea is a restaurant with a sound and light show attached, or perhaps a sound and light show with a restaurant attached, as you’ll soon see.

As soon you enter the space, you realise that this is not going to be your everyday meal experience. When we got there, the place was already extremely busy despite it being early, and apart from the stressed out person at the front desk, the staff all seem to be very smiley.

We were led to our table and started the challenging task of trying to read the menu (despite what our photos depict, the lighting actually does vary during the evening, depending on what’s being projected onto the screens).

The maritime theme extends to the food on offer. There is lots of fish and seafood (actually the restaurant even has its own oyster bar, open just in the evenings from Wednesday to Sunday) and the prices seem pretty honest – between 15 and 20 euros for a main dish, with desserts costing between 8 and 10 euros.

Some might say that the main attraction of the restaurant is the constant sound and light show on offer, with projections on the screens and lighting that is borderline rock concert by moment (see video above). In any case, the place has a very different feel than most restaurants, with a lot of tables filled with groups of colleagues from the many offices nearby and quite a few families, because the place is guaranteed to please kids.

If you’re looking for calm and minimalism though, you should probably go elsewhere.

The restaurant was so busy that it took a while for the food we had ordered to arrive. When it did, we were surprised to see that they’d forgotten to serve us our starter, so we sent the dishes back and asked for the pappa al pomodoro burratta that we had been waiting to share.

Described on the menu as being “creamy and melty”, we actually found it rather compact but still acceptable, with a spice-infused sauce packed with tomato taste (apparently it’s a traditional sauce from Tuscany that’s so famous, it even has its own song!)

Literally 20 seconds after having finished the starter, the main dishes reappeared (seemed a little suspect). The first was pollack with crunchy vegetables and a curry sauce “simmered for hours”. While we found the sauce a little too rich, the dish was a success.

The second main (strangely, one of the dearest on the menu) was less impressive – a fishburger. The description on the menu was mouthwatering though – “a bun made by Les Reconvertis, fish of the day, comté cheese, caramelised red onion, fried onions and cucumber pickles served with roasted diced potato and tartare sauce“.

Since our visit, this very greasy and mushy creation has been removed from the menu, perhaps because it was nigh-impossible to eat cleanly, with the fish fillet constantly slipping out from between the two pieces of bread. While our tastebuds appreciated it, the look of the burger was not refined at all…

After getting through our large portions we really weren’t hungry any more. Nevertheless, we decided to shar a dessert – French toast (pain perdu) drizzled with a salted caramel sauce, homemade crème anglaise with Madagascar vanilla, and caramelised hazelnuts.

This turned out to be surprising light and not over sweet. We finished it off without much trouble at all!

To sum up, our dinner was out of the ordinary to say the least, with an incident (that you won’t encounter) that we have to tell you about. When the waiter arrived with our main dishes, a child tried to take them out of his hands to serve us! We were all a little in shock 😳

Maybe kids are a little more difficult to keep an eye on in a darkened room, just as keeping the floor clean is apparently a challenge (it felt rather sticky in more than one place).

Combine that with the problems serving our food in the correct order and the interior design that may not be to everyone’s taste (the shipwreck filled with coral!), and you’re sure to have an evening that’s as memorable as unusual!

Under The Sea (here) is open seven days a week for lunch and dinner

Oyster bar open evening only from Wednesday to Sunday

Online booking here

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