Behind an unmarked door at Wenwen, a homey Taiwanese restaurant in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, a discothèque awaits: Speakers pump out pop songs in Mandarin, Cantonese and Taiwanese. Strobe lights dance throughout the partitions. A disco ball twirls above. A framed poster of Taiwanese pop star Feng Fei-fei hangs instantly reverse the bathroom.
The bathroom?
This clubby oasis in Greenpoint is truly a rest room. But the music, the neon and the lengthy line to get in might make you assume in any other case. Diners put up selfies from inside the room extra usually than they put up about the meals, stated an proprietor, Eric Sze.
“I don’t know if restaurant loos will ever be the cause you go to a restaurant, and so they in all probability shouldn’t be,” Sze stated. “But I feel the toilet can and may and shall be one of the explanation why you like going to this restaurant.”
Restaurant loos are available many varieties. Some are unadorned, poorly lit and even dirty. Others are lovingly provided and thoroughly appointed, with Aesop hand cleaning soap, D.S. & Durga candles or the eye-catching, seemingly omnipresent flamingo wallpaper. Still others strive to enliven a routine go to with quaint adornments like a joke plaque or bumper stickers.
But then there are loos that go far past easy consolation or comedy to make a daring assertion about the restaurant’s id — usually delighting and intriguing clients as a lot as the meals does.
A fantastic bear rendered in neon-like LED lights on a mirror In the toilet at the Spanish restaurant Mad, in Houston (Amy Scott/The New York Times)
Sze described Wenwen’s restroom as “a little bit Narnia door” into his thoughts: While rising up in Taiwan, he sang these songs in karaoke rooms.
At Gracie’s Ice Cream and Earnest Drinks in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 53 Dolly Parton pictures and album covers and 18 commissioned portraits of the singer cowl the partitions. Her best hits play on a loop.
What does Dolly Parton need to do with ice cream? Both make folks joyful, stated Aaron Cohen, an proprietor, and Parton “is similar to a saint.”
Most clients, he pointed out, don’t anticipate a lot from a restaurant toilet. “It is a straightforward alternative to shock folks.”
He tried to maintain that shock underneath wraps at first, however somebody created a Google Maps entry for the “Dolly Parton chamber.” (All 5 reviewers awarded it 5 stars.)
Statement loos are hardly a brand new factor in dining. Mission Chinese Food, Danny Bowien’s genre-bending restaurant in downtown Manhattan, opened in 2014 with a “Twin Peaks” toilet that includes the TV sequence’ spooky theme music and a portrait of the character Laura Palmer. (Like Palmer, the restaurant has departed.) Canlis, a fine-dining restaurant in Seattle that has been open for a number of many years, has a rest room that evokes a Japanese Zen backyard, with stone flooring and bamboo.
That form of creativity has change into extra commonplace in recent times, stated Thomas Kemeny, a contract artistic director in Austin, Texas, who has photographed restaurant loos for an internet artwork sequence titled “Excuse Me, Here’s the Bathroom.”
“I feel they present a bit extra of their character than they used to,” he stated. “There is extra possession of the entire area of the restaurant.”
Diners are additionally paying nearer consideration. The toilet selfie is edging out the overhead shot of that plate of pasta, stated Joe Romano, a software program engineer at Meta in New York, who runs an Instagram web page the place he critiques restaurant loos: @peebeforeyouleave.
“Taking photos of the meals is so overdone,” Romano stated. “You don’t need to appear to be a TikToker taking photos of each course or dish. But once you go to the toilet, nobody is judging you. You can escape.”
He added, “It is virtually like a spa away from the restaurant.”
Or a circus enjoyable home. At Mad, a Spanish restaurant in Houston that opened in 2019, the toilet partitions and ceilings are lined with mirrored panels, punctuated by neon LED lights that change shade. The design is impressed by the up to date aesthetic of many Madrid eating places, stated Remington Bruce, the director of operations.
Most clients simply need the selfie. Some “have one drink and a tapa and take a photograph in the toilet and depart,” Bruce stated.
In some instances, the toilet is used to subvert expectations a few restaurant.
The restrooms at la Barbecue, in Austin, sport colourful murals by artists Zuzu Perkal and Xavier Schipani. One is Studio 54-themed and has drawings of clubgoers, a disco ball and a neon signal that glows with the phrase “Fantasy”; the different has images scribbled with spray paint, a big pair of sun shades hanging above the door and a hip-hop playlist.
The Studio 54-themed mural in the toilet at la Barbecue in Austin, Texas. (Jessica Attie/The New York Times)
“I wished la Barbecue to really feel totally different than different barbecue locations,” stated LeAnn Mueller, an artist and co-owner of the restaurant, which opened final yr in its present location. “I didn’t need it to be like your regular, you’ve received a dissected pig, a dissected cow on the wall, a beer signal. I wished it to be very art-forward.”
The toilet “is a spot the place you possibly can categorical one other aspect of the way you need the story of your restaurant to be advised,” she stated.
At Wolfpeach in Camden, Maine, which opened final yr, the eccentric toilet feels at odds with the high-end fare, like duck with braised leeks. There’s a Nineties club-music playlist, dark-green partitions, a single hanging lightbulb and a altering array of objects, like a deer horn bedazzled with pearls and crystals by artist Olivia Vanner. Six candles line the base of the partitions, “prefer it’s a ceremonial room,” stated Gabriela Acero, an proprietor.
When a dining room is impeccably adorned however the toilet is spare, she stated, “it takes you out of the magic of being out to dinner.”
The toilet at Wolfpeach goals to keep up that magic, whereas telegraphing that this isn’t “valuable tremendous dining,” Acero stated.
It’s a spot for folks, together with herself, to reset and let free in non-public, she added. “I am going to that rest room and twirl round for 5 seconds a pair instances a shift.”
This article initially appeared in The New York Times.
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