The first time we read about Ithaa Undersea Restaurant in the Maldives, where you eat dinner five meters below the Indian Ocean, with reef sharks patrolling overhead, we were genuinely intrigued – not for how instagrammable it might be, but like who even came up with this wild idea (and could execute it), that too back in 2005.
We researched, and will have to give a standing ovation to M.J. Murphy Ltd, a design consultancy based in New Zealand.
“We have used aquarium technology to put diners face-to-face with the stunning underwater environment of the Maldives”, says Carsten Schieck, General Manager of Hilton Maldives Resort & Spa.
“Our guests always comment on being blown away by the color, clarity, and beauty of the underwater world in the Maldives, so it seemed the perfect idea to build a restaurant where diners can experience fine cuisine and take time to enjoy the views without ever getting their feet wet.”
And that’s how we got the first-ever transparent undersea restaurant in the world!
Diving Five Meters Down
When we say this restaurant is five meters underwater, it really is – surrounded by water on all sides, with a 270-degree arched acrylic ceiling so thick it’s basically an immovable submarine.
The walls are curved and transparent, and five inches of R-Cast acrylic separate you from the Indian Ocean at all times.
Outside, a living coral reef, schools of yellow snappers, electric blue surgeonfish, and, if the timing is right, a manta ray glides overhead.
And whether you take it as a challenge or luck, only fourteen people get to see this all at any given service.
And why not? The name is Ithaa, it’s Dhivehi for “mother of pearl,” and like its namesake, this all-glass sanctuary offers the most extraordinary experience, dining within the ocean itself.
The restaurant sits at Conrad Maldives Rangali Island in Alif Dhaal Atoll, and the fact that you have to travel to one of the most remote islands on earth to get there is, we think, part of the point. You don’t stumble into Ithaa. You cross oceans, and then you go five meters further down into one of them, and there you have your dinner.
Built to Be Sunk
Here is the part of the story that floored me, because the story of how Ithaa came to exist is almost as good as the restaurant itself.
In February 2004, M.J. Murphy Ltd. was approached by Crown Company in the Maldives to build something nobody had witnessed before. The vision at first was fairly conventional with straight walls & glass windows. Then Mike Murphy suggested the acrylic tunnel concept, a curved, fully transparent structure that would wrap you in the ocean, and suddenly the whole thing had soul.
They couldn’t build it in the Maldives because the technical challenges were too many for a structure that was eventually going to weigh 175 tonnes, so they built it in Singapore, constructed entirely on land, completed in October 2004, lifted onto an ocean-going barge on the 1st of November, and sailed across the sea to the Maldives over sixteen days.
On the 19th of November 2004, they sank it into the ocean with 85 tonnes of sand ballast loaded into its belly, maneuvered it onto four steel piles that had been hammered into the seabed, and secured it with concrete.
Then they turned the lights on, and there it was, the restaurant.
As You Sit Down
Ithaa isn’t just a beautiful room with a fish tank attached. The food is as real as it could get. It’s contemporary European with Maldivian influences, built around local and sustainable ingredients like Maldivian lobster, saffron-infused scallops, Wagyu beef tenderloin, yellowtail kingfish with coconut foam, reef fish paired with tropical reductions, and more.
Basically, here, the chefs translate the ecosystem around them into the food on your plate.
During Lunch, the Maldivian water at midday is almost aggressively turquoise, and every fish shows up in full color. But as the light drops, the reef shifts into its night mode, and the whole atmosphere outside the glass changes. The sharks begin their patrol & overhead sea turtles glide with that prehistoric grace of theirs, and you just sit there with your wine glass halfway to your mouth, and you forget, briefly, everything.
Interestingly, in February 2025, Chef Yim Jung-sik, whose New York restaurant Jungsik made history in December 2024 by becoming the first Korean restaurant in the United States to earn three Michelin stars, took over Ithaa for two nights. Twenty-eight people in total, across two evenings, got to eat the dishes he prepared.
You heard it – Twenty-eight people in the whole world.
The fact that a three-Michelin-starred chef looks at all his options and chooses to bring his most ambitious work here tells you the weight this place carries in the industry. Yet another reason for you to reserve your seat there soon!
The Best Part
You don’t need to stay at the Conrad Maldives to eat here. You can arrive for the day, come for lunch or dinner, take your seat beneath the sea, and enjoy the food. And, trust me, every minute you’ll spend there will be at the front of your mind.
Because Ithaa is not the most technically sophisticated restaurant in the world, and it is definitely not the most decorated, but it might be the most singular.
Tell me if there is any other place on earth where the thing you’re looking at and the thing you’re eating are in such direct, genuine conversation with each other, where the setting isn’t backdrop but content, where being there in that glass room with fourteen people and five meters of ocean above your head is itself the meal.
It has been running since 2005, and every single service, fourteen people sit down inside the Indian Ocean and have dinner, and some of them, most of them we think, come back up the spiral staircase a little bit different than they went down. That is worth talking about. That is worth crossing oceans for.
