A Ladies' Room Lament
By: Melissa Clark
February 5, 1998 | Updated: February 17, 2026
Although most people with normal digestive tracts don’t associate dinner at a fine, fancy restaurant with a trip to the bathroom, I must confess that I do. Contrary to what you might be thinking, this interest in rest rooms is not linked to some kind of obsessive compulsive preoccupation with the scatological. Rather, it stems from my childhood.
When I was young, my parents spent the better part of our summer vacation eating their way through France’s premier restaurants. Sometimes, they took my sister and me with them. While they tasted and indulged in all kinds of delicacies in the dining room, my sister and I went to the bathroom. The longer we were gone, my parents knew, the nicer the bathroom was, and my sister and I amused ourselves in a proper Eloise fashion by spritzing huge quantities of perfumes and air fresheners at each other, making the hand towels into hats, and flushing to the tune of “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree.” For me, a fun bathroom in a restaurant was even more important than good food, with which we were not allow to monkey.
In my slightly more sedate and gourmet adulthood, a restaurant’s food has certainly eclipsed its bathroom in importance. But I do still find myself longing for bathrooms that offer more than mere function. I want elegance and space, too. There used to be a reason that bathrooms were called “rest rooms” and “ladies’ lounges.” In the old days (and still in Radio City Music Hall and some ritzy department stores), rest rooms were truly places of rest, where ladies could recline on velvet settees and powder their noses to their hearts’ content. If one was having a traumatic dinner experience, there would be no better place to land in a teary heap and pour one’s heart out to the attendant.
But now, bathroom attendants have gone the way of the pull-cord flush, and even bathrooms themselves seem to be disappearing, getting smaller and smaller as restaurateurs decide that the space would be better used to cram more tables into the dining room. In Manhattan, where rents are huge and spaces tiny, some stalls are becoming so narrow that anyone other than a fashion model must slink in sideways.
However, even I must concede that a bathroom need not be large to be lovely. As Nancy Mah, a restaurant designer at the Rockwell Group, asserts, “you can make a bathroom special by using mosaic tiles – like I did when I designed the The Bryant Park Grill and other beautiful materials, by the choice of hardware, and by having adequate mirrors and a space to place a handbag or even change a baby.” Then there is the lighting, which, Mah insists, “should be as important in the bathroom as it is in the dining room.”
I couldn’t agree more about the lighting. There is nothing so jarring as spending several hours enjoying a marvelous dinner in a swanky restaurant, and walking into the bathroom to see your tipsy, over-fed self under a florescent bulb.
While a thoughtful design is essential to a good bathroom, on the other end of the spectrum are those bathrooms that are over-designed to a fault. Take Phillippe Starck’s famous bathroom at the Royalton Hotel in NYC. The first words out of my friend’s mouth after checking out the much- touted room was to say, “Only a misogynist could have created this.”
Okay, so I won’t go there, but I will say that Starck did design a vastly unflattering, non-user-friendly room. The lighting reflects the cold, concrete walls and floors, and the stalls, covered in the only mirrors in the room, are baffling. We stood in front of them for some very long, urgent minutes, trying to figure out how to open them since there are no knobs, handles, or even a panel that connotes “push.” When we finally figured it out (you have to push the mirror–and its reflection of yourself–out of the way to get in), we couldn’t reach the toilet paper, which is located behind the commode instead of up front. It is a humiliating twist, especially after a few martinis in the jewel box-like bar. My advice: hold it until you get home. (By the way, just to add insult to injury, rumor has it that the men’s room is glorious and sports a fountain – a fountain! – that also serves as a urinal.)
What is ironic about these current bathroom trends–that they are getting smaller and in some cases weirder–is that the restaurants themselves are getting larger and more conventional. Many of them are even turning towards the whole 1950’s-style of decor and service (Jean-Georges and Patroon to name two), which should go hand in hand with a commodious rest room. But with rents constantly on the rise and profit margins so precarious, it doesn’t look like restaurateurs will ever give in to a backlash demanding spacious, genteel ladies’ lounges. In the words of Nancy Mah, “That kind of luxury belongs to another era. Unfortunately I think that era is gone for good.”
Looking for a loo with a view? Here are some of New York’s nicest water closets. Whether they’re elegant, cute or just plain interesting, they all do the job and do the job nicely.
An American Place
Cafe Gitane
Le Bernardin
Le Cirque 2000
Mark's (at The Mark Hotel)
Rainbow Room
Tapika (worth the required stair-climb)
Vong
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