There’s a restaurant in Rust, Germany, where your table glides through rooms. The chairs float, vibrate, and dance in sync with 15 other diners experiencing the same eight-course meal at the exact same moment. Every 27 minutes, a new group begins. By the end of the night, 160 people have moved through the same track, eating 1,600 individual plates of food prepared in a circular kitchen in the center of it all.
This is Eatrenalin, and it opened in November 2022 after Thomas Mack and Oliver Altherr spent five years figuring out how to combine the mechanics of a theme park dark ride with the Michelin-level cooking.
Mack runs Europa-Park, one of Europe’s most successful theme parks. Altherr spent two decades as CEO of Marché International before he died in 2024, leaving behind a concept that’s won the TEA Thea Award and is now in talks to expand to London, New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas.
The price starts at €195 per person, climbing to €645 for the Sommelier Dinner. Most people say it’s expensive before they experience it, Mack noted in an interview, then afterward they say it’s too cheap.
How It All Came Along
You start in a lounge with champagne and canapés, which gives the kitchen time to prepare while you settle in. Then you’re led into a room where your floating chair waits, an individual table attached, positioned among 15 others.
The chairs are patented technology from MACK Rides, each one containing over 2,100 components and weighing 320 kilograms. They took a year and a half to develop, going through seven prototypes before the team got the choreography right.
“Every second is choreographed,” explained Felix Heuberger, Chief Operating Officer and one of the original developers. “Because every 27 minutes, a new group starts their experience.” There’s no room for error. The chairs have to move through eight themed rooms seamlessly, and the kitchen has to serve every course at precisely the right moment to 10 different groups throughout the night.
The rooms themselves are designed around the menu. The ocean takes you into dark blue depths. Taste delivers what they describe as an explosion of flavors. The universe puts you on board a futuristic spaceship experiencing weightlessness.
Each room uses multimedia content, original scores, haptics, scents, and lighting to create an environment that matches what’s on your plate.
When you book, you choose between the Red Dimension (meat and fish) or the Green Dimension (vegetarian). Any dietary requirements are logged in the system tied to your specific seat, so the kitchen knows exactly what everyone will eat before service even starts. This eliminates food waste almost entirely.
“We have no food waste as we know exactly what people will eat beforehand and can plan for staffing,” Mack said.
The Kitchen in the Middle
The circular kitchen sits in the center of the attraction, sharing cleaning and back-of-house facilities with Hotel Krønasår next door.
Serving 160 people across 10 groups means preparing 1,600 individual plates per night, all timed to arrive at the exact moment the chairs glide into the appropriate room. Such precision required is closer to manufacturing than traditional restaurant service.
Since May 2025, Peter Hagen-Wiest has overseen the culinary direction. He’s held two Michelin stars at Ammolite, The Lighthouse Restaurant at Europa-Park Resort, for eleven consecutive years.
For the latest menu that launched in August, he invited three other two-star chefs to collaborate: Christian Kuchler from Restaurant Schäfli in Switzerland, Stefan Heilemann from Widder in Zurich, and Paul Stradner from Villa René Lalique in Alsace.
Each chef reinterpreted one of the themed rooms. Heilemann curated Ocean with salmon trout, quinoa, sweet potato, passion fruit, and mint. Stradner brought his style to Umami with red mullet, citrus fruits, pak choi, and miso. Kuchler presented the main course in Universe: venison, duck liver with celery, venison jus, red cabbage salad, and lingonberry gel. Hagen-Wiest created the finale in Incarnation, a chocolate tart with milk chocolate ganache, pineapple, mango, tamarind, and rice.
“Working with friends on one idea and giving each room our own touch is a special experience, both for us chefs and for the guests,” Hagen-Wiest explained.
What the Guests Experience
The entire journey takes about two hours. And, no, don’t worry, you’re not passively sitting while courses appear. You constantly move through constructed environments where sight, sound, scent, and physical sensation all align with what you’re tasting.
The chairs don’t just transport you between rooms; they become part of the storytelling. They tilt during certain moments, vibrate to enhance specific flavors, and even reveal a meal at one point through mechanical movement.
Jana Pachler, product manager for Eatrenalin, emphasizes that “every visit to our restaurant is an individual experience. Even with repeated visits, our guests discover the rooms again and again from new perspectives.”
After the meal ends, guests return to reality in the Eatrenalin Bar, which can turn into a party lounge on Friday and Saturday nights when a DJ provides live music.
Bar Manager Turusan Demir describes his job as “expect the unexpected” because every evening brings different dynamics depending on the groups visiting.
The Development
The idea for the floating chair and, basically, everything that happens at Eatrenalin came five years before opening, inspired during a ride on Voletarium, Europa-Park’s flying theatre attraction.
Mack and Altherr wondered why wine from sunny Italy tastes different in rainy Rust, Germany.
Taste, they realized, is all about context. Light, sound, temperature, narrative, anticipation – everything influences taste. That’s why, for the best experience, they needed to transport their guests into the story and environment, not just serve them food.
So, MACK Rides began developing custom dark ride vehicles specifically for this application.
Prototype number seven finally worked after several weeks where earlier versions, according to Mack, spent time “bashing into each other.”
In fact, getting 16 individual floating chairs to move in perfect synchronization between rooms, tilting and vibrating on cue while people ate dinner on top of them, required solving problems separate from any theme park or restaurant.
The concept draws from the entire MACK Group’s offerings: MACK Rides created the floating chairs, MACK Animation and MACK One handled immersive staging, and MACK Music contributed the emotional soundscape.
Creative Director Katja Mack led an international team that designed the multi-sensory dramaturgy, creating precise interplay between visual, acoustic, olfactory, gustatory, and haptic elements.
The total investment was €15-20 million. For cities interested in bringing Eatrenalin to their location, there’s an option to lease the chairs rather than buy them outright, which reduces the upfront capital requirement.
Why It Actually Works
Eatrenalin is very particular about its logistics.
Where traditional fine dining relies on its servers reading the room, adjusting pace based on how quickly guests eat, and accommodating spontaneous changes, here, everything operates on a fixed timeline.
Chairs move whether you’re ready or not.
This may sound restrictive until you realize it’s exactly what enables the whole experience to function.
The booking system opens slots gradually to avoid gaps. Every seat has been filled since opening in November 2022, which suggests they’ve calibrated pricing correctly for the experience delivered.
The experience appeals to a specific audience willing to pay €195-645 for dinner, which limits the addressable market but also ensures the guests who do book understand what they’re paying for.
What Comes Next
Mack is in discussions with developers to bring Eatrenalin to London, New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas.
He says urban locations could support higher throughput with larger footprints. He’s even suggested Las Vegas could accommodate breakfast seatings to further increase revenue potential.
And honestly, it might be work, because in urban settings, such a theme would function as a standalone attraction competing directly with high-end restaurants and immersive entertainment concepts.
Whether the model translates outside the context of a theme park resort remains to be proven, but the awards and consistent bookings suggest the core concept has broader appeal, nevertheless.
