An overhead view of the Grand Tier restaurant. Photo courtesy of the Grand Tier | The Grand Tier There are two places where a restaurant like the Grand Tier could exist: inside a snowglobe, or inside New York City’s Metropolitan Opera. Luckily, it has been housed in the latter — encased in some 45,000 feet of glass, no less — for the past 60 years, where it offers hungry opera-goers a surreal experience. I have never before, for example, eaten a crab cake while locking eyes with a flying goat in a 30-foot tall Chagall painting, nor have I ended dinner with the trill of a glockenspiel, reminding me that it’s time to finish my dessert and watch Madame Butterfly confront her cheating husband. For the general manager George Krpeyan, that’s just another Tuesday night. A week prior, I called him on the phone to learn more about how the Met manages to feed the thousands of people in its halls, and, particularly, about the feat of the Grand Tier’s intermission service. It’s also worth noting that I came on a Met Under 40 night, which offers discounted tickets for folks under 40 years old, and aims to usher in a younger, more diverse audience. It’s also a task that feels especially important in light of recent discussions about the opera’s cultural relevance, which were clumsily and rather insultingly catalyzed by actor Timothée Chalamet’s remarks during a recent interview, and which culminated in a general consensus that, yes, the world…
