The scene

Wine flight “It’s all about your ab and butt muscles,” Andrea Hiller explains as she somersaults slowly through mid-air suspended by a harness attached to thin wires. The 19-year-old Columbia College student applied to be a hostess at Texas de Brazil (51 E Ohio St, 312-670-1006), a churrascaria that opened last month in River North, but instead the owners hired her as an “aerial wine artist.” Tinkering with a Wii-like handheld controller, Hiller lowers herself down and squints at an order on a flat-screen monitor 15 feet off the floor, then zips up the 40-foot-tall wine tower to retrieve the bottle. Outside the glass wall that surrounds the cellar, diners take a break from the table-side meat parade to shuffle around the salad and sushi stations. Chad Cunningham, in town from Cincinnati, puts his salad plate down to snap a picture of Hiller, but he’s skeptical: “It seems like a really inefficient way to stock wine,” he says.