• April 21, 2008
• Vol. 69
• No. 15

Mile-High Dining

By Pete Norman, With Maakie Ruepert, Peter Mikelbank

The Latest Culinary Craze Offers a Bird's-Eye View. Just Don't Look Down

Fasten your seat belts, ladies and gentlemen, dinner is served. In a dizzying new twist on high-end cuisine, Belgian entrepreneur David Ghysels offers a meal to remember: six courses (including a seafood platter) served by a chef and three waiters on a platform suspended 160 feet above the ground by a crane. "I constantly had the feeling I would fall, so I tried to hold on to the table. It makes it hard to cut a piece of meat," says event planner Jill Oomen, 32, who otherwise enjoyed eating aloft when she first tried it last September. The cost is pretty high too: Dinner in the Sky, with operations in Europe and South Africa (and a brief promotional appearance planned for Las Vegas in early April), charges its mainly corporate clients around $38,000 for a seating for 22, including wine. Vertigo, however, is free of charge. Says another high-flying customer, decorator Luk Knevels, 52: "It's like eating in the clouds."