Behind an unmarked door at Wenwen, a homely Taiwanese restaurant in Brooklyn, a discotheque awaits: Speakers pump out pop songs in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Taiwanese. Strobe lights dance across the walls. A disco ball spins above it. Opposite the toilet is a framed poster of Taiwanese pop star Feng Fei-fei.
The toilet?
This clubby oasis in Greenpoint is actually a bathroom. But the music, the neon and the long line to get in might make you think otherwise. Diners are more likely to post selfies from the room than about the food, said one owner, Eric Sze.
“I don’t know if a restaurant bathroom will ever be the reason to go to a restaurant, and it probably shouldn’t be,” said Mr Sze. “But I think the bathroom can and should be one of the reasons why you love going to this restaurant.”
Restaurant bathrooms come in many forms. Some are unadorned, dimly lit and even dingy. Others are lovingly supplied and carefully decorated, with Aesop hand soap, DS & Durga candles or the striking, seemingly ubiquitous flamingo wallpaper. Still others try to brighten up a routine visit with unusual decorations such as a joke plaque or bumper stickers.
But there are also bathrooms that go far beyond simple comfort or comedy to make a bold statement about the identity of the restaurant – often as intriguing customers as the food.
Mr. Sze described Wenwen’s toilet as “a little Narnia door” to his mind: Growing up in Taiwan, he used to sing these songs in karaoke rooms.
What’s Dolly Parton got to do with ice cream? Both make people happy, said Aaron Cohen, an owner, and Ms. Parton “is like a saint.”
Most customers, he pointed out, don’t expect much from a restaurant bathroom. “It’s an easy opportunity to surprise people.”
He initially tried to hide that surprise, but someone made a Google Maps entry for the “Dolly Parton room.” (All five reviewers awarded it five stars.)
A better-kept secret are the bathrooms at Sofreh, an Iranian restaurant in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights. While the dining room decor is quite minimalistic, one toilet is almost completely covered in vintage Iranian movie posters. In the others, clips from some of those movies are projected onto the wall.
Before Sofreh opened in 2018, Nasim Alikhani, the chef and co-owner, noted that the bathrooms of New York restaurants were “nicely done, good hardware, great tile,” but they weren’t nice, she said.
She wanted hers to be not only fun, but also educational. The films she shows were banned after the Iranian revolution in 1979 because of their western influences.
“My whole job at the place is not just serving Iranian food,” she said. “I’m there to present the culture, the music.”
Statement bathrooms are hardly anything new to dining. Mission Chinese Food, Danny Bowien’s genre-bending restaurant in midtown Manhattan, opened in 2014 with a “Twin Peaks” bathroom featuring the spooky theme music from the TV series and a portrait of the Laura Palmer character. (Like Mrs. Palmer, the restaurant has left.) Canlis, a Seattle fine dining restaurant that’s been open for decades, has a bathroom reminiscent of a Japanese Zen garden, with stone floors and bamboo.
That kind of creativity has become more common in recent years, says Thomas Kemeny, a freelance creative director in Austin, Texas, who has photographed restaurant bathrooms for an online art series titled “Excuse Me, Here’s the Bathroom.”
“I think they’re showing a little more of their personality than they used to,” he said. “There’s more ownership of the entire restaurant space.”
Diners are paying better attention too. The bathroom selfie takes out the top view of that plate of pasta, said Joe Romano, a software engineer at Meta in New York who runs an Instagram page where he reviews restaurant bathrooms: @peebeforeyouleave.
“Taking pictures of the food is so over the top,” Mr. Romano said. “You don’t want to come across as a TikToker taking pictures of every course or dish. But when you go to the bathroom, no one judges you. You can escape.”
He added, “It’s almost like a spa away from the restaurant.”
Or a circus fun house. At Mad, a Spanish restaurant in Houston that opened in 2019, the bathroom walls and ceilings are covered in mirrored panels, punctuated by color-changing neon LED lights. The design is inspired by the contemporary aesthetic of many restaurants in Madrid, said Remington Bruce, the director of operations.
Most customers just want the selfie. Some “drink and tapa and take a picture in the bathroom and leave,” Mr. Bruce said.
In some cases, the bathroom is used to subvert expectations about a restaurant.
The toilets at la Barbecue, in Austin, feature colorful murals by artists Zuzu Perkal and Xavier Schipani. One is Studio 54 themed and features drawings of clubbers, a disco ball, and a neon sign with the word “Fantasy” glowing; the other has pictures scrawled in spray paint, large sunglasses hanging over the door, and a hip-hop playlist.
“I wanted la Barbecue to feel different from other barbecue places,” says LeAnn Mueller, an artist and co-owner of the restaurant, which opened last year at its current location. “I didn’t want it to be like normal, you have a dissected pig, a dissected cow on the wall, a beer plate. I wanted it to be very art-forward.
The bathroom “is a place where you can express another side of how you want your restaurant’s story to be told,” she said.
At Wolfpeach in Camden, Maine, which opened last year, the eccentric bathroom feels at odds with the high-end dishes, such as duck with braised leeks. There’s a playlist of ’90s club music, dark green walls, a single hanging light bulb, and a rotating array of objects, such as a deer’s horn studded with pearls and crystals by the artist Olivia Vanner. At the bottom of the walls are six candles, “as if it were a ceremonial space,” says owner Gabriela Acero.
When a dining room is impeccably decorated but the bathroom is vacant, she said, “it takes you out of the magic of eating out.”
Wolfpeach’s bathroom aims to preserve that magic while telegraphing that this isn’t “precious fine dining,” Ms. Acero said.
It’s a place for people, including herself, to reset and let go in private, she added. “I go to that bathroom and spin for five seconds a few times a shift.”
But adding a personal touch to a bathroom can be expensive. Sean Spurlock, a founder of Two Cities Pizza (which serves New York- and Chicago-style pizza in Mason, Ohio, and Suwanee, Ga.) said he spent about $30,000 to get the bathroom at the Ohio location out. show as a New York City subway car. It has subway maps, mock advertisements, hanging handles, and even a loudspeaker announcing that the doors are closing.
Customers love the look, he said. “If it had cost double, we would still have done it.”
But at Pinyon, a pizza restaurant in Ojai, California, Jeremy Alben and Tony Montagnaro, two of the owners, said it only took about $500 to give their bathroom a psychedelic makeover. The decor includes frog posters, black lights, a mushroom lamp and a speaker that chirps frogs.
Many new restaurants in Ojai are splurging on a common aesthetic of “all neutral woods and one-color accent walls,” Montagnaro said.