http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/01/31/flushes-and-flashes-at-ramsay/so we turn to the restaurant’s restrooms. I previously established the degree to which overwrought, over-thought bathrooms in splashy restaurants intrigue me with an article in the Dining section in mid-2005. I alluded to the subject again in a review of Morimoto last year.
But I’m hardly alone in my fascination. Grub Street, the restaurant-related blog that New York magazine began last year, has a recurring feature called “Restroom Report.”
I was too pressed for time today to search Grub Street’s archives to see if it had gotten around to the restrooms at Ramsay. They’re behind the bar in the London Bar, which is the casual component of the two-restaurants-in-one Ramsay operation, and they’re one-person restrooms, a whole long line of them behind stylish glass doors.
The problem: those swinging doors have to be positioned so precisely vis a vis the locking mechanism, and that mechanism has to be finessed with such delicacy, that some diners don’t succeed in locking their restroom doors.
How do I know this? Because on my very first visit to the Ramsay restaurants in the London NYC Hotel, during my very first attempt to use a restroom, I twice in a row pushed on the door of a restroom that hadn’t been successfully locked, felt it give, began to take a step inside and . . . encountered another diner!
Well, hello! So sorry to disturb! You go on about your business and I’ll go elsewhere with mine!
Yikes.
