Facilities Management

From design to amenities, restaurnts place greater emphasis on the state of their restrooms.

By Erin J. Shea, Associate Editor -- Restaurants & Institutions, 9/15/2006

Ceiling-to-floor walls between stalls provide privacy and comfort, says Kit Ary, Claim Jumper interior designer.

Restrooms are not exactly the showplaces of a restaurant, for obvious reasons. Private spaces where customers spend only brief moments when dining out, restrooms don’t define an operation in the same way a stellar server or killer main course does.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the facilities can’t break a restaurant either.

“How a bathroom looks is one of the last things that operators consider,” explains Aaron Allen, CEO of Quantified Marketing Group, a Heathrow, Fla.-based restaurant consulting firm that focuses on marketing and concept development. “But it’s really a place where customers ask themselves, ‘If the bathroom looks like this, what must the kitchen look like?’”

Whether it’s choosing a shade of paint, a brand of hand soap or lighting fixtures, details shouldn’t be left to chance when it comes to restrooms. “A brand has to be consistent at each touch point,” Allen says. “A bathroom has to reflect the personality of a brand as much as any logo or ad campaign.”

Attention to Detail

When Gale Gand visits a guest’s table at Tru, she often makes an unusual suggestion.

“I tell people to make sure they go to the bathroom while they’re here,” says Gand, partner and chef at the high-end Chicago restaurant. “There always is a chain reaction after one person goes. We watch the tables when bringing the food out because if one person checks it out, two or three more will follow.”

Particularly fond of the angled sheets of glass that serve as sinks in Tru’s bathrooms, Gand says the attention placed on the operation’s restrooms is deliberate.

“We’ve found that the bathroom can make a difference between taking you from four stars down to 3.5,” she says.

Gand says that at Trio, the Evanston, Ill., restaurant where she and Tru Chef-partner Rick Tramonto previously worked, “We didn’t have control of how the bathrooms looked. We told ourselves that when we had our next fine-dining restaurant, we were going to focus on making bathrooms modern and interesting.”

While taking that extra design step in the restrooms may seem obvious in white-tablecloth restaurants, it matters across all industry segments.

“The bathroom reflects how concerned the company is with the guests’ comfort,” says Kit Ary, in-house interior designer for the Irvine, Calif.-based Claim Jumper restaurant chain. “If the restroom is shabby or not well-designed it shows a lack of follow-through.”

Ary explains that if comfort and care are goals, that message must be found beyond the dining room.

“We put full, ceiling-to-floor walls in between each of the stalls,” she says. “It gives our guests more privacy and a richer, more pampered feeling.

“At a restaurant of our caliber, guests are coming to expect that sort of feeling whether they’re at their tables or in the restrooms.”

Nuts and Bolts

It’s not only good design that customers expect in restaurant restrooms.

“There are a lot of things going on in a bathroom that make you feel better than just a wow design,” says Michael Schwartz, chef-owner of Miami restaurants Afterglo, Nemo and Michael’s Genuine Food & Drink.

Donnie Madia, co-owner of Chicago’s Blackbird, sees the restroom as an opportunity to give his guests something extra, another element that contributes to a positive guest experience.

“The washrooms are a place to provide people with nice, tangible things to touch,” says Madia. “The kind of hand lotions we provide for our guests leave them wondering why we’d have these nice accouterments, why we went an extra step for something like hand lotion and soap.”

Gand concurs. Having lived and worked in Europe, she says that extra amenities help create the difference between a good restaurant experience and a brilliant one. “Atomized water and lemons in finger bowls, providing little touches guests wouldn’t see elsewhere is really important,” she says.

For Schwartz, it’s a matter of understanding customer expectations. “I know from an operational standpoint it doesn’t make sense to provide a nice hand towel, but I know what a difference it makes,” he explains.

“Those are the things that go into your guests’ overall opinion of dining in your restaurant.”

Sparkle and Shine

Even an artistic sink, elegant faucets and soap that smells pretty can’t compensate for an ill-kept restroom.

“Bathrooms mainly need to be clean,” says Blackbird Co-owner Donnie Madia. “You don’t need to play little games with your bathroom if it’s clean.”

With operators installing touchless sinks, hand soap dispensers and dryers in their restrooms, keeping guests germ-free is easier than ever, but it shouldn’t stop there.

“Operators should be doing a deep cleaning once a day to keep up with the high-volume traffic that comes through a restroom,” says Kyle Taylor, a principal researcher in product development for a Cincinnati-based cleaning-products manufacturer. “You need to do touch-ups during the day to stay on top of it.”

Tru’s Gale Gand says she and partner Rick Tramonto will hire full-time attendants for the oversized restrooms that will serve the four new concepts that they and Cenitare Restaurant Group are developing for The Westin Chicago North Shore hotel in Wheeling, Ill.

While that may be unrealistic for most operations, there are steps that Taylor recommends every restaurant take:

“Typically an employee just wipes down the sinks and the mirrors,” she says. “Take more time to clean the toilets and urinals.”
“Have products on hand that are Environmental Protection Agency registered for disinfecting. Products that kill mold and mildew will make things not only visibly clean but smell clean too,” says Taylor.
“The basic cleaning tools are important,” she says. “Use towels and not sponges. Have separate brushes for the toilets and the floors.”
“Use products that customers recognize and brands that they know work well to clean and disinfect,” she says.