What is it with the state of Toronto's restaurant washrooms?
If you've dined out in the city, you know what I mean. Not all establishments are guilty. You usually find the classic example in a storefront dining room, maybe on an established commercial street like Queen or Yonge or Dundas. Long narrow spaces in older buildings. Not a lot of elbow room. Owners, like any smart business people, want to maximize their seating area and their revenue.
So what to do with a non-monetized space like the WC? Well you stick it in the basement, of course.
Being in the basement is not an inherently awful thing. I have been in a considerable number of nice basements in my life. But in Toronto, it's like there's a bylaw that requires stylistic neglect of all subterranean rooms containing or purporting to contain running water. These facilities are treated as if there's not a part of the establishment at all. Perhaps they are contracted out to property managers in the developing world.
The other day I was at Soos, a Malaysian fusion restaurant on Ossington, Like many of its Ossington-strip peers, it's a fashionable spot, with attention to every dining-room detail. One wall is painted with evocative red lanterns. A big spiky lighting fixture in the centre of the room is set off against funky mechanic's lights hanging over the tables. A vintage-looking wooden screen separates the front room from the bar. It's all exceedingly tasteful. There was a huge table of fashion-retail types there the night I was there, every hair in place, making me feel like I should be drinking a cosmo.
The food was pretty, too. Not to mention tasty. Especially the pork belly pancakes.
The stairs to the loo, worn wood, were not out of character from main room. No, you had to make the full descent. Stepping onto the basement floor was like pulling back the curtain at a vaudeville theatre. It was an alternative universe, perhaps lorded over by an ornery junkyard owner for whom aesthetics are both offensive and cumbersome.
Bulkheads in the hallway, bulkheads over the sink where I bonked my head. The tile and fixtures were so dated, so cheap and blah, they might have been purchased at a fire sale in 1979. They might have been given away by a low-end contractor. The paper towel dispenser would not have been out of place in a prison.
It was not dirty. Everything worked. I won't compare it to a gas station washroom. But not a smidge of attention had been paid to its appearance and comfort. So it was comparable to a very clean, well-maintained gas station washroom. Except it was underneath a trendy restaurant.
Soos is not unusual. I have been in the washrooms of nice Toronto restaurants where non-functioning urinals have been covered with garbage bags, where mops are left standing by the sink, where soap coats a cheap plastic soap bottle, where the toilets are baby blue, where the caps on the sink's taps are missing.
None of this is the end of the world. But why on earth, when a restaurant is trying to create an environment for which $50 a person is the starting price for a decent meal, do Torontonians put up with it?
Is it because no one wants to admit they go to the bathroom, not even restaurant owners?
