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.