An overly expensive hand soap may save your toilet reputation

You know the feeling. You’re having a fantastic meal. Pigeon here and langoustines there, accompanied with a glass of Riesling. The tableware is carefully thought through: beautiful ceramic plates, thin glassware, and the music is just right. The menu is printed on soft, shell-coloured paper, heavier than the pages your printer fed out to you six hours earlier.

Everything is in its place. The interior is calm, the tableware is beautiful, and you’re convinced that everything tastes better because of how carefully curated everything around you is.

Until you have to excuse your hot date to “powder your nose”- but truthfully, it’s time to break the seal. Gotta go.

As you ask for directions to the ladies’ room and open the door, you realise that what you’re about to see may either bring you crashing back to reality and break the illusion you’ve been living in for the last hour… or seal it completely.

The toilet.

The most overlooked room (at least the one accessible to the public) in a restaurant. It can go either way. But before you step in, you hope it’s not one of those where the toilet seat slips to the left the moment your arse touches it or where they’ve given up replacing the toilet roll inside the overly complicated loo roll holder that probably felt like a great idea when they were designing the room.

Water drips from the sink where the hot and cold taps are never equally tight.

You go to soap your hands, briefly excited as you see an Aesop bottle looking back at you- but the moment you press the pump, a bright blue liquid comes out.

You try to turn off the water and realise there are no hand towels. Behind you is a white hand dryer that blows with less force than your hairdryer at home.

But hey- the music is playing and the lighting is great.

Well fuck. Maybe the langoustines weren’t that great after all.

MATIAS MOLLENBACH
Oba Citralis Soap

Listen, if your restaraunt is fancy enough, noone would mind the fact that before you are using this soap, there has been many hands using it too.
Instead, it feels like a experience. It feels like you are part of the art performance you have been experiencing when sitting by the dining table. Tell me about levelling up the experience by just buying a fancy soap…

The pro side? The soap dish is included in that £36.

BYREDO
Hand Wash & Cream

A good old Aesop is a safe choice in every bathroom if you want to uplift the product consumption experience.

But maybe look a little bit further to make you stand out more for the same cash. Byredo perfumery is offering a beautiful and minimalistic series of hand washes that makes you feel like you stepped in to a shop on the Fifth Avenue just by needing to let some waters out. 

Loewe
Tomato Leaves Hand Cleanser

If you want to be extremely in-theme, and make people think about your food even when they are spending time in the toilet.
If you do want that, then maybe you should have a think about introducing some Tomato Leaf scented things into your restaurant, like a Loewe Tomato scented hand soap and notice everyone who is walking out of the loo, pressing their hands softly to their face. And the moment they arrive back to the table, they push the same fingers in front of their date face to let them sniff too.
“Come on, smell it. It’s like summer in Italy…”