Bali’s only aquarium restaurant

Spooky sci-fi music plays in the background as a long flat creature with big googly eyes swims past our table. I take a sip from my beverage: a fluorescent blue liquid with a large fluorescent green ice cube that makes my head swim as our waiter brings a pair of mushroom-shaped skewers made from the flesh of a sea creature to our table. No, I am not at the Mos Eisley Cantina on the set of the original Star Wars film, or in one of the famous underwater restaurants in the Maldives. I am at Koral, an aquarium restaurant built under the ground at the ultra-luxury Apurva Kempinksi resort in Bali’s Nusa Dua. This dimly lit fine-dining restaurant isn’t set ‘inside’ an aquarium as I imagined. Rather, there’s a huge aquarium with 15cm-thick glass inside it filled with stingrays, reef sharks and hundreds of tropical fish. Tables, leather couches, a bar and open-plan kitchen are set on either side of the aquarium, though the best and most expensive seats in the house are inside a glass tunnel that connects the two sides of the restaurant.

Dining at Koral is strictly by reservation; the best I could get with only 24 hours notice was a 5.30pm sitting. A reservation deposit of $50 per head is required and if you’re more than 15 minutes late, you can lose your booking.

Instead of choosing dishes from the menu we opt for one of the six-course degustations, or set meals, that include two desserts. But we end up getting about 10 courses if you add all the extras executive chef Jean-Baptisite Natali — a prodigy who at 27 became the youngest chef in France to earn a Michelin star — sends to our table, including some Australian Wagyu with a marbling score of 8/9 that is perfectly matched with Balinese peanut satay sauce and a couple of glasses of 15-year-old red from Bordeaux. Most of the time we have no idea what we are eating. At one point our waitress serves us barramundi, even though it looks like something a Klingon warrior might dangle into their mouth in an episode of Star Trek. We turn down the toadfish, a Japanese specialty that can kill you unless sliced properly, and a couple of the dishes they serve us are downright weird.

There are four different degustation menus at Koral, including a vegetarian option. Dinner at Koral costs $180 to $380 per head with matching wines, though I got a freebie for this honest-to-god review. kempinski.com/en/the-apurva-kempinski-bali