Piazza dining room

The Piazza dining room is the Metropol’s grand dining hall off the lobby, a public space designed to resemble the city beyond the hotel rather than the polished exclusivity of the Boyarsky. Its changing crowds, strained service, and seasonal absences make it both a meeting place and a visible record of upheaval. For Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, it is also a place where solitary routine gives way to an unexpected acquaintance with Nina Kulikova.

Setting and Design

The Metropol had two restaurants: the Boyarsky, a celebrated retreat on the second floor, and the grand dining room off the lobby. Officially the latter was called the Metropol; Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov affectionately called it the Piazza. It was not meant to rival the Boyarsky in décor, service, or cuisine. Its distinction lay in a different ambition: to extend the city indoors.

Eighty tables stood around a marble fountain beneath a great glass ceiling. The menu ranged from cabbage piroghi to veal cutlets, and the room welcomed Russians of every social background to linger over coffee, encounter friends, fall into arguments, or drift into flirtations. Even someone dining alone could remain among the activity, watching and judging without leaving the table. The space offered not simply food but a cross-section of public life, with the fountain and surrounding tables making the room feel open to chance encounters.

Service and Social Life

Before the war, the Piazza’s waiters were known for speed and precision. They could fit a party of eight at a table for four, remember preferences amid the orchestra’s noise, serve a round of drinks without losing a glass, guide a hesitant diner toward a house specialty, and clear plates and settle the bill in less than a minute. Their skill was practical rather than ceremonial: they knew the work down to the crumb, spoon, and kopek.

The contrast with the room Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov later encounters is sharp. The dining room is nearly empty, and his waiter seems inexperienced, tall and thin, with a narrow head and a superior air that recalls a bishop on a chessboard. The Count arrives with a newspaper, a familiar sign that he is dining alone, but the waiter leaves the second place setting uncleared. When the Count closes his menu to indicate that he is ready to order, the waiter fails to notice until summoned. He then recommends Sauterne with okroshka and sole, prompting the Count to correct the pairing politely by asking for a bottle of Château de Baudelaire. The details turn the meal into a small demonstration of how far the restaurant has fallen from its earlier standards.

The sparse room also sharpens the Count’s awareness of his own routine. He has begun counting the steps on his regular descent to the lobby, reaches the Piazza for lunch at 12:01, and climbs the 110 steps back to his room at 1:35 while already calculating how long he must wait before returning for a drink. The empty tables offer little relief from his restlessness. Two remnants of the diplomatic corps pick at their food while waiting for diplomacy to return; another diner compares four large documents word for word. No one pays the Count much attention. The dining room still contains company, but its former bustle has thinned into isolated occupations.

Nina Kulikova and the Fountain

Among the few diners who notice the Count is a nine-year-old girl in yellow, seated behind the fountain with her governess. According to the waiter Vasily, she is the daughter of a widowed Ukrainian bureaucrat. When she realizes that the Count has seen her watching him, she disappears behind her menu. The fountain and the tables around it thus provide more than a picturesque setting: they make possible a silent exchange of glances across the room before the girl approaches him directly.

On another visit, as the Count attends to his okroshka, the girl appears beside his table without introducing herself and asks where they have gone. Her abrupt question opens an acquaintance on her own terms: curiosity first, the ordinary courtesies later. The room’s public character permits this brief crossing between an adult dining alone and a child who has been observing him from across the fountain. Nina’s recurring presence at her usual table gives the Piazza a personal continuity even as its surrounding social life changes.

Seasonal Ritual and Significance

From the Metropol’s opening, Moscow had looked to the Piazza to set the tone of the season. By five o’clock on December 1, evergreen garlands with red berries decorated the fountain and strings of lights hung from the balconies. The crowds arrived from across the city: by eight, every table was occupied, and by nine, waiters brought chairs in from the corridors for latecomers. Caviar appeared at every table, whether the gathering was high or humble. The shared dish and crowded room made the seasonal celebration seem to cut across distinctions of status.

The winter-solstice scene Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov finds is a deliberate reversal of that abundance. The room is bare of garlands and lights, an accordion player occupies the bandstand, and two-thirds of the tables stand empty. Yet the custom survives in miniature. Nina is at her usual table by the fountain, wearing her bright yellow dress with a dark green ribbon tied around the waist. The Count bows to her and offers a Christmas greeting; she stands and curtsies in reply. The exchange preserves a form of ceremony in a room where the public celebration has largely disappeared.

Across these visits, the Piazza shifts from an imagined extension of Moscow’s streets to a diminished dining room whose absences are as legible as its remaining routines. Its broad design continues to invite meetings, but economic and social change have drained away much of the crowd that once animated it. The contrast between packed seasonal tables and the nearly empty room, and between expertly coordinated service and the inept waiter, makes that loss concrete. Nina’s repeated appearance at the fountain supplies another kind of continuity: within a public space marked by decline, a small and distinctive acquaintance takes shape.