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Under the Dome

The visual and culinary arts collide inside this restaurant under a planetarium dome in Denmark

In one restaurant in Denmark you can, throughout your meal, see the colorful spectacle of Aurora Borealis above your table, dine among a school of jellyfish, and watch cherry blossoms gently fall from trees all around you. The Alchemist — a restaurant in Copenhagen that reopened with a new artistic design direction from British architects, Duncalf Ltd. — has six rooms that blend culinary with visual art media.

In the main dining room of the 22,000-square foot restaurant, guests dine under a 57-foot planetarium dome that surrounds the dining room in a 360-degree visual enhancement that projects 12 different 12 scenes onto the dome, so that throughout their experience, guests can be transported to Japan’s cherry blossom trees or under the ocean with a sea of jellyfish.

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The Alchemist’s extensive 50-course menu is just as artistically unique as its physical design, as guests travel from room to room to taste each course. Created by chef Rasmus Munk, the full tasting menu costs a whopping 1,500 DKK ($223.95 USD) and includes such dishes as edible paper, pine and lemon verbena-scented snowflakes, a tomato water snowball, and a cow’s Achilles tendon.

One of the dishes — Plastic Fantastic — is a nod to The Alchemist’s environmental bent, and comments on the bits of plastic that can be seen floating among the jellyfish projected on the dome.   

“I want Alchemist to comment on the present and create something that can resound further than the restaurant industry,” Munk said. “I want people to eat — and then think.”    

Contact Joanna Fantozzi at [email protected] 

Follow her on Twitter: @joannafantozzi

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