Echoes of John Lewis: Piazza at Royal Opera House reviewed

The Piazza is not a piazza – a realisation which is always irritating – but a restaurant in the eaves of the Royal Opera House, now restyled and open to those without tickets to the opera or ballet. If it were honest, Piazza would name itself Attic or Eaves, but the Garden, as idiotscall it, has long been a slave to delusions of the most boring kind. (It is no longer a garden in the wreckage of Inigo Jones’s square. I wish it were.) I would be happy to dine in a restaurant called Eaves – my favourite hotel is a hole in a wall by the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem and my favourite restaurant was a man with a fish in Jamaica – but, in London, even attics are not what they ought to be.

I once spent a week backstage at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, watching ballet dancers not eat, and in the eaves I found a piano graveyard, a tutu graveyard and, further on, a musical-score graveyard. Those are eaves to be proud of, but the people there are still obsessed with the siege of Leningrad, when a German shell hit the cupola and snow fell in the theatre: at least that is what they told me. I want to believe it, but I love Pyotr Tchaikovskyfor the violence of his flounces.

Here, at the Garden that is not a garden, they have no such dedication to their myth: rather they seem to long for John Lewis. Perhaps that is a peculiarly English thing, but it is not the Englishness I admire. I do not understand why the people who run the opera house strip out everything magical they can find.

Piazza is a new and carpeted nadir. At the ground-floor entrance, you are stared at and searched and then admitted: the days of idly wandering into London’s public buildings are gone.