High-end dining just got a lot higher.

Just when you think going out to eat is losing its magic, these 10 oddly themed restaurants push the envelope and really get you your money’s worth. For some of them, food is secondary to the ambiance, or not even part of the picture. For others, the tastes of the menu items are piqued by the complementary atmosphere. Whatever you’re into – cats, ninjas, or handcuffs – a few of these restaurants are sure to make it to your bucket list.

Yellow Treehouse Café, New Zealand

The Yellow Treehouse offers a unique setting that channels the excitement of your tree-climbing days. Patrons of the restaurant dine in an illuminated pod-shaped structure perched 10-meters high in a Redwood tree. The pod can hold 30 guests at one time. As for the food, it stays grounded – all dishes are fresh, seasonal, and adapt to clients’ needs.

Cabbages & Condoms, Bangkok

As its namesake suggests, the food at Cabbages & Condoms is “guaranteed not to cause pregnancy.” The restaurant was created to support the Population and Community Development Association, an organization that provides sex/AIDS education and awareness. The garden restaurant is an introduction to Thai food – in only the safest way possible – and instead of mint favors on your way out, you’re given a box of condoms.

Calico Cat Café, Tokyo

Imagine going to a café that only serves cat food, but there’s a chance that it’s too crowded to get a seat. The Calico Cat Café in Tokyo is just that popular. The café caters to your love for coddling and feeding cats sans the commitment. Patrons are asked to sanitize their hands and remove their shoes upon entering and to abide by set rules: do not hold or stroke a cat if it resists you, do not wake a napping cat, do not hold cats with scarves around their necks (they are too young), and do not bring cat nip or cat food to the café. For $9 per adorable hour, the café is a bargain. Only, you’ll leave hungry.

Ithaa Undersea Restaurant, Maldives

The magical Ithaa Undersea Restaurant is the first of its kind in the world. The restaurant is located 5 meters (16 feet) under water off the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island and serves contemporary Asian-inspired European cuisine. The restaurant is encased in R-Cast acrylic and can host 14 people at one time, offering a 270° panoramic underwater view.

Unsicht-Bar, Cologne and Berlin

Heighten your other senses by taking away one very important one: sight. The Unsicht-Bar, with locations in Cologne and Berlin in Germany, uses the dark to strip patrons of their vision and take them on a culinary adventure that requires they focus more on taste, temperature, texture and smell. All light is forbidden, including that coming from watches and cellphones. The restaurant’s waiters are also either blind or visually impaired. The food, which is described enigmatically to leave an element of surprise, is served in a context-appropriate manner, avoiding a confusion of flavors or a potential mess. The flavors are simple, but profound in that they are enjoyed in an entirely new way – without visual prejudgment.

Ninja New York, New York City

Japanese cuisine just got more interesting. At Ninja New York, diners are wowed, and often at the edge of their seats, with ninjas jumping around, pop rocks on sushi rolls, smoke machine action, magicians, and an overall festive and upbeat atmosphere. The restaurant’s décor aspires to mimic a ninja village from the feudal days, providing patrons with a sense of what it was like back when.

Chill Out, Dubai

As if Dubai has not enough marvels as is, the city offers a unique way to, well, chill out. Chill Out is an architecturally fascinating refrigerator lounge with special lighting and design works that highlight the innovativeness of the frozen structures. Before entering the bar, Patrons are offered thermal clothing – parka, shoes, and gloves – and are then led to the Eskimo oasis. A complimentary mocktail or hot chocolate welcomes you.

Devil Island Prison Restaurant, China

This restaurant was initially conceptualized to scare people from a life of crime. Upon entering this restaurant, patrons are allocated a number, photographed, fingerprinted, and optionally handcuffed. The interior of the restaurant is designed after a prison, with sliding jail doors, metal floors, and rusty iron bars. Patrons dine in a prison cell and are served by waiters dressed in black-and-white striped inmate uniforms. Food includes fried, coffin-shaped bread.

Dinner In The Sky, Worldwide

Suspended 50-meters high by a crane, diners at Dinner in the Sky can host an event practically anywhere. The table is equipped with 22 seats, one chef, one waiter, and one entertainer. Dinner in the Sky operates in more than 15 countries, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, and South Africa. The event can be hosted for up to 8 hours, with the time fragmented – people can come and go at whatever interval of time. As for a bathroom break, have no fear, the crane will lower for relief without interrupting the experience for more than a few minutes.

Marton Theme Restaurant, Taiwan

Originally serving chocolate ice cream in toilet-shaped containers, Marton Theme Restaurant has certainly gained quite the fanfare over the years. There are now Marton restaurants across Taiwan and the company has recently changed the name of its restaurants to “Modern Toilet Restaurant,” all of which offer a full menu that can be enjoyed whilst sitting atop a toilet.

Images: Jeremiah Ro, Meredith P., Carsten Lorenzten, Karendotcom127, Wonder Bus Tours Dubai, Smart Travelers

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Willows Inn offers the freshest seafood imaginable…from right outside the door.

Organic dining from a chef trained at the world’s best restaurant: Willows Inn is sheer heaven for foodies. It’s also the antidote to the hustle and bustle of city life, where you’d expect to find such summa cum laude gastronomy. Culinary star-in-the-making Blaine Witzel (age 25) trained at Noma in Copenhagen, where Rene Rezdepi has taken on Ferran Adria’s mantle as today’s most garlanded restaurateur. Now Witzel (pictured below) wows the crowds at this idyllic slow food haven on a tiny island off the coast of Washington State.

The Pacific Northwest is famous for its fabulous shellfish, especially razor clams, but also crabs, oysters and scallops, and fish such as salmon and halibut. They don’t have far to travel to reach your plate. Local organic vegetables provide the supporting roles in Witzel’s starry menus – don’t be surprised to see beach-foraged seaweed make an appearance. “Fished, foraged and farmed,” as they say since many ingredients as possible come from the island itself, and the water around it.

The seven onsite guest rooms in this wood-built inn are a stylish mix of traditional and contemporary featuring organic bathroom goodies, free WIFI and some rooms even have radiant heating, for toasty toes. Two rooms in the detached guest house have their own private decks and bath tubs; you can also stay on the farm where much of the food served at the restaurant is produced, including the eggs, or in stunning beachfront houses and apartments around the island.

If you’re all gourmeted out, have a massage (in your room, if you prefer) or a hot stone treatment in the spa. Then roll down to the nearby beach or venture out into slow-paced Lummi Island, with its thriving community of artists and artisans and respect for the environment; the island is renowned for its sustainable fisheries and eco-farms.

The more adventurous (and die-hard foodies) can take a kayak out to visit the other San Juan islands, minding any Orca whales or seals en route, to forage for sea lettuce, Saragassum, and beach plantain.

Rates from $204 including tax and whale-watching from the comfort of your room; the kayaking is an extra activity.

Photos: Willows Inn, Celebrate Big, coffee&donuts

Places & Spaces is a travel guide that will inspire you to carve out a vacation on your calendar. All of the gorgeous locations and accommodations in our guide share our concern for the environment. From tent glamping to lavish built environments, fair warning, you’ll feel compelled to pack your suitcase.

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25 breathtaking places threatened by us.

Some may try to deny it, but by now there’s next to no doubt that global warming is having real, profound effects on the world we live in. Perhaps one of the most alarming changes is occurring in the world’s oceans and endangering islands with diverse ecosystems, rich cultures, and breathtaking, beautiful landscapes. Pacific island nations like Kiribati and the Marshall Islands have already come to terms with the irreversible nature of the crisis and are formulating long-term relocation strategies for their residents.

The islands pictured below have been identified as being highly at risk for the devastating consequences of climate change. Their beauty is a reminder that global action is needed now.

(above) Palau

Tuvalu

Antigua

St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands

Kiribati

Fernandina Island, Galapagos

St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands

Nevis

Bartholomew Island, Galapagos

Northwestern Hawaiian Islands

Solomon Islands

Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia

Papua New Guinea

Maldives

Guam

Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia

Fiji

Nauru

Majuro, Marshall Islands

Tonga

Rabaul, Papua New Guinea

Lord Howe Island, Australia

Kauai, Hawaii

Norman Island, British Virgin Islands

Aitutaki, Cook Islands

SEE ALSO:

40 Gorgeous Photos of Europe

40 Gorgeous Photos of North America

40 Gorgeous Photos of Latin America

40 Gorgeous Photos of Asia

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ExclusiveTouring St. Helena and beyond.

“He died of stomach cancer,” are nearly the first words that come out of our tour guide’s mouth. The guide, a diminutive woman of no more than four and a half feet, is adamant on this point. We’re standing in the drawing room of Napoleon Bonaparte’s exile house on one of the remotest islands in the South Atlantic. After the battle of Waterloo, Napoleon was captured by the English and was exiled to St. Helena, one of only three inhabited islands in The South Atlantic Ocean. The Saints, as they are called, maintain that Napoleon’s death at age 51 was of natural causes – not of arsenic poisoning which many of the French believe – in parting, our guide might as well have said, “we really, really, really didn’t kill him…really!”

St. Helena is home to about 5,000 residents most of which live in a small town called Jamestown. This island is rarely visited by tourists, as there is no airport. Leaving or visiting the island means boarding a ship. Supplies come every six weeks by ship from South Africa.

A British Protectorate, St. Helena served as an important resupplying point for The East India Trading company in days of yore. The streets are cobblestone and the architecture British colonial. Just off the key, a mote stands in front of a castle gate that extends across the valley floor to the steep cliff sides that rise on either side of the town. Along the cliffs are decrepit bunkers and batteries used for defending Jamestown from attack. Dying of natural causes or murdered didn’t matter, Napoleon wasn’t going anywhere.

Our crew was on a stop over enroute from Walvis Bay, Namibia on our way across the Atlantic to Montevideo, Uruguay. St. Helena sits about 400 nautical miles directly north of the northeast border of The South Atlantic Gyre, the area where my crew is sailing through to study plastic pollution.

Arriving in the morning, we swam from our ship waiting for customs and immigration to clear us. From the deck I spotted a massive Whale Shark cruising the anchorage. Standing on the bow-sprit of our sailing vessel, Sea Dragon, I could see her speckles, her leviathan, ponderous bulk, wallowing in the clear cerulean water below. Witnessing such creatures in a place known to few on the planet is to enter another dimension, one more like the place a child’s mind manifests when in enthralled in a fantastical storybook.

It’s at these moments nature makes me present, illuminating for me the phantasmagorical industry that she really is, that she wants to be, if we just let her. A degree of respect pays for itself in aesthetic truth and bounty preserved. Conservation itself is an investment in the bank of wonder. For me, everyday on the sea conjures such revelations. It’s truly a gift to be 37-years-old and feel my baseline notion of purity deepening, when many believe the world is or already has gone to shit. 24-hour news cycles be damned. Give me mother ocean, a stiff breeze, dawn and dusk. I will navigate my own way.

I was off to the landfill and to the one beach to look at washed up plastic. Yes, our taxi driver was surprised. There are few taxis on the island and typically they’re only used for tours. There is nowhere else to go than Jamestown. To me, seeing waste from a community of 5,000 people who consume products of the modern world in a limited space is a fascinating enterprise. It’s akin to geneticists studying pure bloodlines of indigenous peoples. Self-reliance and limited space can often make proper waste management not a moral responsibility but a practical need.

The dump was better than many I’ve seen. One of the things I look at as a plastic pollution researcher is how the stuff enters the ocean. Often, island landfills will be situated just adjacent the sea where winds will blow a river of plastic trash out at the same break-neck speed with which humans consume it. St. Helena’s was no different than other islands with regard to how its landfill was sited, but I could tell by how the tree line leaned that the dominant wind was onshore and constant under-tilling of the earth stopped the vast majority of blow-trash from entering the ocean. However, the location was atop of what would be a watershed when the rains came.

It’s a funny concept, burying trash that doesn’t biodegrade. It’s not really going anywhere. There is no “away” in “throwaway” as they say. Living on a small island reminds you of that immediately. The plastic buried here are the dinosaur bones of tomorrow. And to tomorrow the anchor comes up and the quest continues. South America, here I come. How dirty are you?

Editor’s Note: This is part 12 in a special series. Voyage with Stiv and catch the exclusive each week here at EcoSalon during his months-long journey into the heart of the South Atlantic Gyre and beyond.
Images: Stiv Wilson

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My island dream house is clean and white, sprinkled with sea glass and hurricane lamps, and images like the frond, coral and urchin found in these new Wabisabi Eco-Art Coastal Pillows. They’re clean and modern to perfection yet the images are derived from an appreciation of imperfection found in nature, another angle to the symmetry that balances so much of Japanese design.

Wabi (cycles of erosion) Sabi (recurrence) is a very green concept, celebrating life cycles. The handprinted throw pillows, $68 at Cottage and Bungalow, are made from bamboo, organic cotton, silky kapot fiber harvested from the rain forest and eco-fiber born of recycled plastic bottles. Yes, it would be counter-intuitive to marry the sea turtle and koi with factory-made polyester.

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