Fine dining takes off

Updated: 2014-07-05 22:54

By Matt Hodges (Shanghai Star)

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Most of my fellow diners were female but there were no screams – except from me when someone suggested I hit my seat recline lever (not recommended) after I asked whether the seats rotate all the way horizontally (they don’t).

Would dinner be better? Highly likely. I would have swapped the midmorning haze and piano music for Shanghai’s electric nightscapes and electronic beats in an irregular heartbeat. But I spend 9,000 yuan on flights to London, not Shanghai Tower .

The biggest disappointment — this being China — was that we didn’t cause any traffic accidents down below. No cars stopped. No crowd assembled. No one gaped and pointed. It was left to WeChat and Weibo to buoy up our fragile egos (this totally worked).

David Ghysels and Stefan Kerkhof launched?Dinner in the Sky in 2006?and have since held over 1,000 "flights" in more than 45 countries. They operate on a policy of choosing one local partner per country and leaving the table and equipment with them.

In March it made The Daily Mail’s top-five list of the world’s strangest restaurants. Forbes put it in the top 10.

Kerkhof was on hand Friday morning attaching GoPro cameras to wire cables and making sure things went without a hitch.

There were a few hiccups — we peaked at 40m due to mid-flight showers, a planned 180-degree table rotation never materialized, I freaked out when he showed me how to flick my seat down — but overall the experience compared favorably to previous in-flight meals.

Legroom certainly wasn’t a problem.

 

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