Restaurants

SkyCity restaurant at the Space Needle, Seattle, WA

When deciding where to dine out, you usually think about cuisine, price, location, and other such considerations. In real life, an “unusual” dinner experience might just mean one that combines great food, extraordinary service, and a decent tab. But if you’re looking for a truly unique dining experience, consider one of these.

It seems most major cities have tower restaurants (Seattle’s SkyCity Restaurant, Dallas’s Five Sixty Restaurant, Las Vegas’s Stratosphere Restaurant, etc.) or revolving restaurants. These offer spectacular views, but for the added “WOW” factor, you need to visit Dinner in the Sky, where you dine in huge glass capsules suspended above historic cities, or actually take flight in a hot air balloon that adds a whole new meaning to “in-flight meals!”

If heights are not your thing, try the Ithaa Undersea Restaurant, 16 feet below sea level in an all-glass dining room. Enjoy dishes of lamb, beef, and, of course, seafood while watching sea life swim all around you.

The normal person would consider a dining disaster to be bad food, a clumsy waiter, or some other catastrophe. The normal person also wouldn’t go looking for a dining disaster, much less pay for one. However, the waiting list to dine in the Disaster Café in Spain is quite lengthy. Why? Who wouldn’t want to experience a 7.8 earthquake during the salad course? Diner’s tip: don’t wear your best dress or suit.

Themed restaurants aren’t always so dramatic, and you can find gimmicky cafes everywhere in the world (Check out: monkey wait staff, incarcerated wait staff in a café inside a working prison, a toilet-themed restaurant).  Another class of gimmicky food establishments are those with unique food-delivery systems, such as boats, trains and even roller coasters.

For more dining experience locations, where it’s not just about the food, check out this website.

Bon appetit!