Wow. We’d forgotten all about this place until you mentioned it. Here’s the story.
Dive! (yes, the exclamation point was somewhat annoyingly part of the name, just like Jubilee!) was the brainchild of none other than director Steven Spielberg, who, rumor had it, decided to build the original venue in L.A. because he couldn’t find a single submarine sandwich that measured up to his childhood memories. So he teamed up with his partner and Walt Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, along with Larry Levy of Levy Restaurants of Chicago, and opened a 300-seat underwater-themed restaurant for himself and his buddies. Only in Hollywood.
Dive!, which debuted in May 1994 in the Century City Shopping Center, took theming to new heights (or rather depths), both inside and out, reflecting Spielberg’s lifelong passion for underwater adventures, as well as sandwiches. The exterior resembled something out of a Beatles’ cartoon, with the yellow submarine jutting out from the corner of the building, complete with periscope, porthole windows, and giant hatch entrance, and the interior was no less extreme. The maze of metal catwalks, pressure gauges, sonar screens, and torpedo-shaped barstools was just the tip of the iceberg.
Utilizing special effects controlled by seven separate computers, Dive!'s continual show included high-fidelity submarine sound effects and projections of actual underwater seascapes from around the world that were filmed in a special high-resolution format to be extra lifelike. The scenes were viewed on a 210-square-foot rear projection "porthole," plus 32 other porthole-framed monitors, and were sequenced so that fish or mermaids would apparently swim past one porthole after another, heightening the illusion of being surrounded by water.
And not only did the multiple TV screens display continual videos of underwater scenes and fish. Every 30 minutes or so, the restaurant "submerged." The diving sequence began with submarine "pings" and mechanical groans, which then progressed to blaring sirens, flashing lights, sonar displays, and flurries of bubbles rising past the portholes.
Initially, the novelty of the design and the menu of 18-gourmet sub sandwiches and other themed dishes like "submaribs" (some of which were allegedly developed by Spielberg himself, who likes to cook) appeared to be a winning combination, tallying 1,000 dinner covers on its first Saturday and attracting celebrity clientele including Michelle Pfeiffer, Tom Cruise, Pamela Anderson, Sharon Stone, Pierce Brosnan, Tom Hanks, Warren Beatty, and Michael Keaton. Nine more venues were planned, complete with all the bells and whistles. One opened the following year on the Las Vegas Strip in front of the Fashion Show Mall at a cost of $10 million (a partnership with Steve Wynn, we understand, who’s another of Spielberg’s buddies). A third restaurant debuted soon thereafter in Barcelona, Spain.
Success proved short-lived, however. After the first year of business, the original L.A. venue was running almost $5 million behind expectations and in January 1999, Dive! closed abruptly. The Spanish venue didn’t survive long past opening, but the Vegas restaurant limped on until December 2000, although we read a review from April 2000 that commented on how the whole underwater submersion effect had been discontinued as it "frightened some of the customers." We can well imagine. We dug out our own review from the July 1995 LVA, where we commented that, "Spielberg, during his boyhood in New Jersey, must not have hung out at the same sub shops that we've eaten at. These aren't great subs." (Although we remarked that kids seemed to love the place, which was still "mega-popular" when we tried it.)
After closing, the L.A. restaurant sat empty until June 2000, when it was dismantled to make way for a more traditional restaurant, and Mr. Spielberg went back to what he was good at, making movies rather than sandwiches.
As a weird addendum, while researching this answer we discovered the blueprints for the $7.5 million original L.A. venue for sale on eBay. The "Buy It Now" price was set at $20,000, but the auction ended with zero bids, as far as we could tell.
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