Locally nicknamed " La dame de fer" (French for "Iron Lady"), it was constructed from 1887 to 1889 as the centerpiece of the 1889 World's Fair and was initially criticised by some of France's leading artists and intellectuals for its design, but it has become a global cultural icon of France and one of the most recognisable structures in the world. It is named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower. The Eiffel Tower ( / ˈ aɪ f əl/ EYE-fəl French: tour Eiffel ( listen)) is a wrought-iron lattice tower on the Champ de Mars in Paris, France. Société d'Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel (SETE) The restaurant’s fare will be French provincial, ″the kind of food the great French chefs prepare for themselves when they go home from work,″ Onorio said. The original part and the new section surrounding it will seat about 250 people at 82 tables, he said. Bonnot, 40, said the mahogany and glass will be new but faithful to the restaurant’s original ambience. The result was a three-year, $3.5 million project.Įverything from the original steel panels to the nuts and bolts has been reassembled inside the glass dome. So Paris businessman George Lancelin acquired the restaurant and engaged its original decorator, Jean Rothschild, to oversee the task of dismantling it, labeling the parts and packing them.īecause of the name ″Tour Eiffel,″ Lancelin was forbidden from reconstructing it elsewhere in the city, so he sold it to a New York investor who shipped it to the United States.Įventually, the red, white, and blue container landed with Stephens, Bonnot and Onorio, and it was shippped to New Orleans. In 1981, engineers noticed that the tower was starting to sag under the weight of the restaurant and other small structures that had been added on.
The romance of the place was said to be so powerful that it brought one couple back every year for 30 years to celebrate their engagement there - same night, same table, same meal. Over the years, heads of state, celebrities and thousands of tourists have dined within its mahogany and glass walls. When the restaurant finally was built in 1937, 14 years after Eiffel’s death, it began a new chapter in the tower’s history. It is said that Eiffel envisioned a world-class restaurant on the second level of the tower to attract visitors when the fair was over. Gustave Eiffel designed and built the 984-foot Eiffel Tower as the centerpiece of the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle.
″Our design doesn’t add anything to the restaurant’s structure, nor does it insert anything into the restaurant,″ Bingler said. The architect, Steven Bingler, said the superstructure recalls the graceful geometry of the Eiffel Tower without trying to imitate it. A 100-foot ramp rises slowly from curbside to meet it. Now those pilings support huge laser-cut steel buttresses that rise 88 feet to frame an octagonal glass dome encasing the original restaurant. Only some concrete pilings staked the restaurant’s claim to new fame along the streetcar line that traverses the swank Garden District avenue. In the meantime, the pieces languished in a 40-foot cargo container in a New Orleans warehouse. However, Stephens died in 1984, and it has taken Onorio and Daniel Bonnot, a chef from Angouleme, France, two years to raise enough money to consummate the project. That’s one of the attractions that persuaded New Orleans businessman McDonald Stephens to acquire the famous restaurant for his four daughters in 1983. They’re already here, and there are lots of other things to do,″ he said. ″We don’t have to take people on a two-hour bus ride from the nearest town. ″If you’re going to do something like that, you had better make sure you can get some mileage out of it,″ says John Onorio, 37, a New Orleans hotelier and partner in the project. Charles Avenue in New Orleans.Īfter all, if you can pluck London Bridge from the Thames and plant it over a lake in Arizona, why not transport the famous Paris restaurant to an American city with ancestry that is solidly French? NEW ORLEANS (AP) _ For 44 years, it served the likes of de Gaulle, Bardot, Picasso, Chaplin and Chevalier as they dined 562 feet over the Champ de Mars in Paris.įive years and 11,000 pieces later, Le Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel is rising above the oaks that line fashionable St.
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