PARIS (AFP) — The Eiffel Tower, symbol of the Paris skyline, this weekend opens a new high-end restaurant at its top end. But what the diners might like to know is that the kitchen -- ovens, sinks and all -- had to be squeezed up a tiny service lift in bits and then welded together again.
"It's a bit like a ship's kitchen or an airplane cabin," said France's most celebrated chef, Alain Ducasse, who is opening the tower's second-storey restaurant Jules Verne this weekend.
On the eve of the opening, somewhat of an event in a city fiercely proud of its almost 120-year-old tall monument, Ducasse and a cloud of workmen, waiters and cooks bustled about the restaurant nestled amid Gustav Eiffel's iron girders, with Paris breathtakingly laid out below.
Ducasse showed off the tableware and new chairs, the 1,000-bottle wine rack, the state-of-the-art designer lighting.
But the kitchen, lit up like Christmas with lights that change colour, was the star attraction.
Set at the heart of a restaurant catering to 130, the compact cooking centre which at any one time will be busy with 13 cooks, was painstakingly put together in just four months -- like the rest of the place.
To begin with, the old Jules Verne had to be picked apart and every piece weighed before being carted down the four-metre-square (43 square feet) service lift clattering up and down the iron-laced tower.
"They were not allowed to add any weight to the existing structure in order to safeguard it," said an official for the monument's managers, the SETE. "They had to take into account the weight of partition walls, the fake ceilings, the chairs, the carpet, everything."
Then the new bits and pieces too had to be weighed and sized up before being squeezed into the tiny service lift, sometimes in bits, and put back together again like Lego toys.
"Ducasse's restaurant finally turned out to be even lighter, weighing in at 40 kilos (88 pounds) less," said the official, who asked not to be named.
Then to save kitchen space, some of the total 47 cooks working for the new restaurant were relegated to a large underground centre built in 1908 and located right under the gardens that surround the historical monument.
Some will be put to work peeling fruit and veg, others scaling fish, cleaning poultry or carving raw meat in the underground kitchen they call a lab, where a team of bakers Friday was at work whipping up cakes and preparing pears in wine.
Wrapped and packed into a refrigerator truck, the food will be driven to the service lift to be ferried to the kitchen 123 metres (yards) up the tower for cooking, saucing and dressing before landing on a customer's plate.
"But we have to take all the prepared produce up to the kitchen for cooking before noon every morning because after that the lifts are busy," said Pauline Mayot, who works with Ducasse.
After the previous management closed its doors at the end of August, Ducasse's team of workers had to labour most often at night to avoid harassing any of the tower's seven million annual visitors.
But with food-lovers keen to whet their appetites on anything new served up by Ducasse -- current holder of 15 stars awarded by the Michelin food bible for various of his 22 restaurants worldwide -- the Jules Verne already is booked out for the weeks ahead.
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