El Café de la Ópera

An idea that arrived with the Teatro Real

El Café de la Ópera sits at Calle Arrieta 6 in Madrid, attached to the four-star Hotel Ópera, directly across the square from the Teatro Real and a few minutes' walk from the Palacio Real. The address is not incidental. The sung dinners began in 1997, the year the Teatro Real was being relaunched as a working opera house, and the restaurant's director, Carmen Carus, pushed the idea as something Madrid's evening programme did not already offer. Manuel Ganchegui took on the artistic direction that same year and has held it since, acting as both programmer and master of ceremonies.

The proposition has barely shifted in nearly three decades. There is no stage, no pit and no amplification to speak of: a grand piano, a room of around a hundred covers, and professional singers who work at table level, metres from the people eating. The house registered the name — Una Cena Cantada® — and by its own count has served more than 4,000 of these dinners, alongside over 600 galas performed away from Arrieta.

The company and what it sings

The performers are billed as the Compañía Lírica de El Café de la Ópera, an in-house ensemble rather than a rotating cast of guests. Speaking in August 2022, Ganchegui described a roster of seven professional singers and three pianists appearing on weekly rotation, most of them trained at Madrid's school of singing. Among those named in coverage of the company are the soprano Virginia Wagner, who has sung at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires and the Teatro Real, the Madrid-based soprano Gema Scabal, and the Cuban pianist Eduardo Ernand, who has played the dinners for years.

The repertoire is deliberately drawn from the best-known end of the catalogue. On the opera side it runs through Carmen, La Traviata, Madama Butterfly and Rigoletto, with 'Nessun dorma' and the Brindisi from La Traviata as reliable fixtures. Zarzuela carries at least as much weight: Luisa Fernanda, La Tabernera del Puerto, La Gran Vía and La Verbena de la Paloma all appear, and Ganchegui has been explicit that boleros and melodic songs belong in the programme too. Singers introduce each number and explain where it came from, which turns the evening into something closer to a guided recital than a floor show. Ganchegui has described the exchange between singer and diner as the part that cannot be scripted.

A menu named after a score

The tasting menu is treated as part of the programming. Each one is named after a lyric work and rotates roughly every two months. The edition launched on 15 October 2021 was called La Cenicienta, after Rossini, and cost €45 with an optional €15 wine pairing; it ran from jamón de Jabugo croquettes through a seafood bisque and tempura hake to slow-cooked veal cheek in port. A later menu borrowed La Zíngarella from Il trovatore. One recent season took its title from Falla's La Vida Breve, with mango gazpacho under avocado ice cream, grilled salmon in Pedro Ximénez and duck confit with orange sauce.

By late October 2025 the dinner was being presented as a five-act menu: spider crab croquette with piquillo jam, langoustine bisque with wasabi caviar, oven-baked hake, braised lamb in Pedro Ximénez with celeriac purée, and a creamy Galician cheese tart with dark chocolate and violet ice cream. The violet ice cream has survived several menus. The version on the table in October 2026 is La Chulapona, after Moreno Torroba's three-act zarzuela: Iberian ham croquettes with truffle mayonnaise, a starter, two main courses and dessert, finishing with cava for a toast. The price is now €65 per person including VAT, with drinks charged separately — roughly a 45 per cent rise on the 2021 figure across five years.

Interruption, and the climb back

The run has not been unbroken. The dinners had passed their twenty-fifth year when the pandemic shut them down for around two years, the longest gap in the company's history. Carus restarted the programme roughly eighteen months into that closure, and by the summer of 2022 the Friday and Saturday schedule was running again with the full seven-singer rotation. The restaurant also closes entirely through August, so the lyric season effectively runs September to July.

Autumn 2026: what is actually on sale

The current Una Cena Cantada block covers Fridays and Saturdays from 2 October to 28 November 2026, all at 20:30, with tickets from €65 and doors at 20:15. Running alongside it, Piano Jazz Café de la Ópera takes Thursdays and Sundays from 4 October to 29 November 2026 at 19:00, from €22.30 — a cheaper, unsung alternative that fills the midweek slots the lyric company does not. Tickets for both go through Ticketmaster and Fever as well as direct booking. An Ópera Brunch runs daily from 11:00, with a later sitting from 13:00, and the à la carte average sits around €35 to €40.

The one real change to the format is a second lyric show. After twenty-seven seasons of Una Cena Cantada, the house added El Encanto de la Zarzuela, a Friday-evening edition at the same 20:30 start and the same €65, that drops opera altogether and builds the night from La Revoltosa, La Verbena de la Paloma and La Leyenda del Beso, with each course prefaced by a prelude from a different zarzuela. The stated reason was to give the genre the whole evening rather than a share of it.

Reception

A first-hand account from March 2024 describes the shape of the thing: the pianist already working through overtures as diners arrive, drinks taken, then singers moving between tables across the courses, with Ganchegui adding numbers beyond the printed programme and the Brindisi from La Traviata landing as the room's set piece. That reviewer rated the duck confit as properly cooked and the salmon as underdone — a split verdict on the kitchen that recurs elsewhere.

Diner reviews through 2026 follow the same pattern. An April 2026 account praised a tenor-and-soprano pairing and the room's atmosphere; a May 2026 anniversary dinner was rated as good value for the price; a July 2026 review singled out the quality of the singers and the match between the music and the courses. The consistent complaint is pace rather than performance: one May 2026 review reported a 55-minute wait for food, which reads as a kitchen stretched by a hundred covers arriving at once. The other recurring note, from both bloggers and reviewers, is that prior knowledge of opera is not required to follow the evening.