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A disco awaits behind the unmarked door of Wen Wen, a homely Taiwanese restaurant in Brooklyn, New York City. Speakers will pump out pop songs in Mandarin, Cantonese and Taiwanese. Strobe lights dance across the walls. A disco ball is spinning above. Directly opposite the restroom is a framed poster of his Taiwanese pop star, Feng Fei Fei.
toilet?
This clubby oasis in Greenpoint is actually toiletBut the music, neon lights, and long lines to get in might make you think otherwise. It is said that he often posts selfies from.
“I don’t know if a restaurant bathroom is a reason to go to a restaurant, but it shouldn’t be,” says Sze. “But the bathroom can and should be one of the reasons I love going to this restaurant, I think.”
Restaurant bathrooms come in many shapes. No decoration, poorly lit and some are dirty. Some are lovingly prepared and meticulously curated, such as Aesop hand soaps, DS & Durga candles, and the eye-catching, ubiquitous flamingo wallpaper. Still others try to spice up their regular visits with tasteful decorations like joke plaques and bumper stickers.
But far beyond simple comfort and comedy, there are bathrooms that make a bold statement about the restaurant’s identity. It often delights and intrigues customers in the same way that food does.
Sze described Wenwen’s toilet in her mind as “a little door from Narnia”. When he grew up in Taiwan, he sang these songs in karaoke rooms.
At Gracie’s Ice Cream and Ernest Drinks in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 53 Dolly Parton photographs and album covers and 18 commissioned portraits of Dolly Parton line the walls. Her greatest hits are played on loop.
What’s the relationship between Dolly Parton and ice cream? Owner Aaron Cohen said both make people happy and Parton is “like a saint.”
Most customers don’t expect much from restaurant bathrooms, he noted. “It’s an easy opportunity to surprise people.”
He initially tried to hide his surprise, but someone created a Google Maps entry for the “Dolly Parton Chamber.” (All five reviewers gave him five stars.)
Statement bathrooms are nothing new in dining. Danny Bowen’s genre-defying restaurant, Mission Chinese Food, in downtown Manhattan features a “Twin Peaks” bathroom featuring the eerie theme music from the TV series and a portrait of character Laura Palmer. It was ready and opened in 2014. (Like Palmer, the restaurant is gone.
This kind of creativity has become more and more popular in recent years, says Thomas Kemeny, a freelance creative director in Austin, Texas.
“I think they’re showing a little more personality than they used to,” he said. “We now have more ownership of the entire restaurant space.”
Diners are also meticulous. The bathroom selfie is an overhead shot of a plate of pasta, according to Joe Romano, a software engineer at Meta in New York who runs his Instagram page @peebeforeyouleave that reviews the restaurant’s bathrooms. is protruding slightly.
“Photographing food is overkill,” said Romano. “You don’t want him to look like a TikToker who takes pictures of every course and dish. But when you go to the bathroom, no one is judging you. You can get away with it.”
“It’s like a spa away from the restaurant,” he added.
Or a circus fun house. At Mad, a Spanish restaurant in Houston that opened in 2019, bathroom walls and ceilings are covered with mirrored panels and highlighted by color-changing neon LED lights. According to his director of operations Remington Bruce, the design is inspired by the contemporary aesthetic of many restaurants in Madrid.
Most customers just want to take a selfie. “Some people leave with a drink and tapas and a photo taken in the bathroom,” said Bruce.
In some cases, bathrooms are used to subvert restaurant expectations.
The restrooms at La Barbecue in Austin feature colorful murals by artists Zuzu Parkal and Xavier Schipani. One is Studio 54-themed, featuring club fans, a disco ball, and a glowing neon sign with the word “fantasy.” Another is a scribbled photo of him in spray paint, a pair of big sunglasses hanging over the door, and a hip-hop playlist.
“We wanted La Barbecue to feel different from other BBQ places,” said artist and co-owner Leanne Mueller. restaurantIt opened at its current location last year. “I didn’t want it to be your usual. There’s a dissected pig, a dissected cow on the wall, and a beer sign. I wanted it to be very artistic.” I was there.
The bathroom is “a place where you can express another aspect of how you want to tell your restaurant’s story,” she said.
At Wolf’s Peach in Camden, Maine, which opened last year, the eccentric bathrooms feel at odds with haute cuisine. There’s a 1990s club music playlist, dark green walls, his one light bulb hanging, and an array of changing objects like deer antlers dazzling with pearls and crystals by artist Olivia Vanner. Six candles line the bottom of the wall, “like a ceremonial room,” said owner Gabriela Acero.
“Even if the dining room is perfectly decorated, if the bathroom is empty,” she said, “it frees you from the magic of going out to dinner.”
Wolf Peach’s bathrooms aim to preserve that magic, but they tell you that this isn’t “precious fine dining.”
It’s a place for people, including herself, to reset and release privately, she added.
This article was originally published in The New York Times.
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