After eight weeks at the Royal Opera House I can now say that my favourite part of this experience has been spending time at the canteen.

You may picture hanging velvet drapes, wooden floors and walls covered with framed posters of past productions and memorabilia carefully set in glass vitrines, but no. It's a plain rectangular white tiled box organised with 30 long tables rhythmically placed along the space and a huge buffet at the end. There is a fourth wall made of glass which outlooks to Covent Garden and through which one can see an unusually beautiful skyline with

-two neogothic towers with a clock each
-the London Eye
-a group of tall buildings that makes me think of Chicago, although I've never been to Chicago.
-three British flags waving
-the turning Coliseum sign on top of the ENO
-fourteen cranes among dozens of black slate roof with smoke coming out of a few chimneys

Until around eleven most technicians have a full English breakfast broken down into elements to facilitate the payment and lunch starts from noon. You can sometimes see the main singers from the current productions eating between rehearsals and sometimes even a visiting star. (I had the chance to see Anne Marie von Otter eating spaghetti Bolognese as she discussed with Sir John Thomlinson, who was having kidney pie with mash and peas, about the duet they were singing together in The Exterminating Angel).

It is unusual to see the Royal Ballet dancers before three coming in their ragged clothes and tight buns to have their half banana and bottle of Lucozade for lunch. And if Oliver Mears -the new ROH director has any at all, it is always between four and five when there’s nobody there except the kitchen staff in their break, and right before the covers come in to celebrate with a full meal, that they are not performing again that night.

The canteen definitely has felt like the most democratic space in Covent Garden while I was there.