Published on August 19, 2025 at 1:59 pm
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Gustave Eiffel needed several things to construct the Eiffel Tower: Confidence in its controversial design, millions of francs, and a permit allowing the tallest man-made structure in human history to stand alongside the Seine for 20 years. His contract stipulated that the city of Paris would tear down the tower in 1909.
Obviously, that didn’t happen. Likewise, the best-known Eiffel Tower replica in Jacksonville has earned a reprieve. Even though the centerpiece of JJ’s Bistro on Gate Parkway was consigned to a storage unit when the restaurant closed on New Year’s Eve 2023, it’s now back in circulation.
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“I wanted to do something different, so I’m going to make crepes and rent out the tower,” Matt Vigoureaux, son of JJ’s founders, confirmed in a recent phone interview.
Much as the original Eiffel Tower’s second act involved radio transmissions and scientific experiments, the Vigoureauxs’ simulacrum will no longer serve as the focal point of a dining room. Instead, it will travel around town to tea parties and bachelorette bashes. While Vigoureaux initially envisioned the tower anchoring his crepe station, with guests circling the 15-foot edifice for chocolate sauce and berry compote, prospective clients have showered him with alternative ideas since he announced the prop’s availability on Facebook.
One woman, for example, has designs on a caviar-and-Champagne setup centered on the structure. “That’s something I’m going to execute,” Vigoureaux said. “I’ve heard of (mobile) hibachi concepts, but I don’t think there’s anything like this.”
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While the tower is unique to Vigoreaux’s family and local restaurant history, the rage for maximalist elements is still going strong in the food-and-beverage sector, almost two years after Eater first noted the popularity of “massive, sculptural” furniture and “screwball objects” in conjunction with splurgy food. A portable version of the tower that loomed large in the lives of Surrealists is possibly the perfect extravagance for this dining moment.
According to Vigoureaux, “people spend insane amounts of money” these days for add-ons that make get-togethers memorable and Instagrammable. (He’s planning to charge $400 for a full day rental, including delivery and assembly of the tower’s three components, which he said takes two people roughly 30 minutes.)
Although Vigoureaux doesn’t recall how much his father, JJ, paid for the tower, he remembers how much the piece meant to him.
JJ and his wife, Benedicte, opened the first JJ’s Liberty Bistro in Ponte Vedra Beach in 1994, about a decade after emigrating from their native France. JJ Vigoureaux had previously held the post of food-and-beverage director at Marsh Landing County Club but was eager to strike out on his own. Within a few years, the staunchly continental restaurant was successful enough that Vigoureaux had spare time to spend with his family and browse antique shops, including one in Jacksonville Beach where the inventory included a replica Eiffel Tower that commanded his admiration.
“He said, ‘One day, I’m going to buy that Eiffel Tower and build a restaurant around it’,” Matt Vigoureaux said. “And that’s exactly what he did.”
On February 1, 2011, JJ’s Bistro on Gate Parkway posted its first photo to Facebook: A portrait of the ceiling-scraping tower, positioned in front of black-and-white wall hangings depicting the actual tower.
Regardless of how patrons felt about the food and service at the spinoff JJ’s, they couldn’t deny the tower was impressive.
“It actually reminds me a lot of the Paris hotel in Las Vegas,” a blogger for Jacksonville Restaurant Reviews wrote in an otherwise unfavorable summation. Invariably, customers would pose with the tower, hamming it up for pictures of their Francophile adventures in the vicinity of I-295.
“We put lights on it for Christmas, and when people rented out the restaurant, they’d decorate it with balloons or whatever,” Vigoreaux said.
After Vigoreaux’s mother died in 2022, the family decided to sell its Gate Parkway space and scale back to the original location of JJ’s, which continues to operate under JJ Vigoreaux’s leadership. There isn’t room in the strip mall dining room for a giant tower, and the younger Vigoreaux began to wonder if he didn’t fit in there either.
“He did want me to run the restaurant full-time,” Matt Vigoreaux said of his father. “I think that was his goal. There is no family drama, but I came up with this idea and felt like I wanted to maybe part ways with my father and do my own thing. I’m very passionate about this.”
In other words, Matt Vigoreaux is aiming high. About 4-and-a-half meters high.
