Las Vegas Wine Angels and Bangkok Zip-Line Servers, Explained

People don’t tend to think of waiting tables as a dangerous profession. The stakes of carrying steaks are not very high when compared to plenty of other jobs. There will never be a Tom Cruise action movie about the perils of serving food in a restaurant. Although waiting tables sometimes feels like an impossible mission, the closest we will ever get to that kind of Tom Cruise movie is when he starred in Cocktail in 1988. The worst thing that could have happened to him in that movie was a bump on the forehead from an errant cocktail shaker after a particularly wayward effort of bartending flair. 

I spent a few years serving drinks in a cabaret room in New York City. Carrying overpriced Cosmos on a tray over my head in a dimly lit space while performers are emoting on a stage mere feet away is challenging but not especially hazardous. That’s not to say that everyone who serves food or drinks has a completely safe job. 

The zip-lining servers of Bangkok

A restaurant in Bangkok, Thailand, called The Royal Dragon held the Guinness World Record for 10 years as the largest restaurant in the world. It had seating for 5,000 diners and covered 8.35 acres. (The current Guinness World Record holder, Bawabet Dimashq Restaurant, has 6,014 seats.) Surprisingly, that was not what it was most known for. The space was so big that servers carried food from one area to the next by way of a zip line, zooming across cables over lagoons, all the while carrying one of the over 1,000 entrées that were offered on the menu. It wasn’t every server who used a zip line and it was probably more of a gimmick than completely necessary, but it definitely added an element of danger to an ordinarily innocuous job.

The restaurant has since shuttered. Its closure may or may not have had something to do with the zip lines, but my theory is that employees could simply no longer handle memorizing the ingredients of 1,000 dishes.

The wine angels of Las Vegas

In Las Vegas (of course) there was a restaurant at Mandalay Bay called Aureole. Most restaurants might have a wine cellar, but this restaurant had a four-story glass wine tower with over 10,000 bottles of wine. Bottles were retrieved by sexy “wine angels,” who were women strapped into a rigging system and flown into the air to place the bottle into their wine holster and then float back to the ground. It was quite the spectacle and people went to see the wine angels just as much as they went for the food. It was like dinner and a show. There were never any reports of injuries, but at least 10 bottles of wine were dropped in its 24-year history. 

The restaurant closed in 2023 and was replaced with a residency by 2013 F&W Best New Chef Michael Voltaggio and brother Bryan Voltaggio. Rumor has it one of the former wine angels is currently starring in a non-Equity bus-and-truck tour of Peter Pan, but instead of pixie dust it’s a 2018 Château Lafite Rothschild that make Wendy, Michael, and John fly and Tinker Bell is costumed in an all-black catsuit.

The roller skating waiters of Shanghai

There are plenty of restaurants where servers are known for wearing roller skates as they serve their guests. Carhops were particularly popular in the 1940s and ’50s and were regularly featured on the television show Happy Days. As a kid, I remember how exciting it was to go to Sonic Drive-In and have someone roll out to our car with my chili cheese dog and lemonade. 

There’s a restaurant, Hong Zi Ji,  in Shanghai, China, that has gone viral with videos of waiters speeding through the restaurant on skates while carrying elaborate plates of food. It’s very, very impressive, but my favorite videos are when things don’t go quite as planned and it’s very, very messy. Roller-skating might not be as risky as zip-lining or being suspended 40 feet into the air to get a bottle of wine, but it’s more challenging than the average server job, and this is far from the only roller-skating restaurant in the country, and places like Riink — also in Shanghai — allow customers to get skating time in as well. 

Personally, I’ll keep my nonslip shoes firmly planted on the ground. If Tom Cruise wants to make a movie about my life in restaurants, he can re-create the scene where I dropped four plates of sizzling fajitas at a Mexican restaurant in Denver. It might not be worthy of a cinematic masterpiece, but at the time it seemed pretty dramatic.