Food Porn Pondering the smuttiness of D.C.'s restaurant bathrooms

Some people are just plain put off by the sight of God with a raging erection.

When Sax, a lounge and restaurant in downtown D.C., held its splashy opening party this past spring, some pretty striking artwork debuted. Murals in the stairways depicted various political and religious figures in precarious situations: priests engaging in ungodly acts with young boys, presidents carousing with harlots. One image showed U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas weighing his ample manhood on the scales of justice. To the side, a red can of soda stood in obvious reference to certain subjects last discussed during Thomas’ confirmation hearings.

The pièce de résistance: a parody of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, featuring Our Heavenly Father sporting some hefty wood under his divine robe. “Michelangelo’s God is a sexy old man,” artist Balage Balogh, the creator of the scandalous acrylics, said at the time. “He’s surrounded by all these younger angels....I played on the same idea, but accentuating the sexuality of it and simply giving him an erection just to give it a big, big, um, tongue-in-cheek point.”

The proprietors of the place had publicized these paintings as a “catalyst for forbidden dialogue in an otherwise conservative town.” It certainly got people talking—though not necessarily in a good way. Within weeks, management had covered up those very conversation catalysts.

Some might conclude from the incident that there’s no market for filth in a nice downtown restaurant. They’d be wrong. Plenty of other white-tablecloth joints are offering titillation and trash to D.C.’s well-heeled diners. But they’re doing it in the restroom.

Like a tour of Washington’s marble monuments, an amble through the capital’s lurid bathrooms might begin with Lincoln—the restaurant, not the memorial.

Last spring, before opening his presidential-themed eatery, owner Alan Popovsky took the online news service Dining Bisnow on a video tour of the ornate Vermont Avenue NW establishment. The videographer spent an awful lot of time in the bathrooms.

First up: the ladies’ room, decorated with shiny stenciled patterns and a number of illusory paintings, some depicting friends of both Popovsky and Maggie O’Neill, the artist who designed the restaurant, bathrooms and all. The men’s room, meanwhile, is awash in innuendo. Old hand-crank drills and other workman’s tools are framed on the walls. If you don’t immediately get the joke, look back at the slogan above the door: “Keep Your Tools Clean.”

Tools also play a background role in the various glossy portraits mounted above the toilets. “We have different models working with the tools,” Popovsky explains. One is a close-up of a woman’s bare midriff. She’s wearing only lacy underwear and a thick steely chain hooked around her waist. Another features a buxom, curly-haired blonde in a black bustier and top hat crouching spread-eagle while she clutches the heel and leg of another gal seen only below the waist, wearing knee-high fishnet stockings. One well-manicured hand rests on the disembodied dame’s upper thigh; the other hand disappears into the shady crevasse between her crossed legs. “I think guys are going to really enjoy it,” says Popovsky.

You’d get the same vibe from making a pit stop at similarly upscale places like Penn Quarter’s wine-centric Proof (its men’s lavatory theme includes photos of women’s rear ends) or the Logan Circle tapas titan Estadio (shirtless soccer players in the ladies’ room). And it’s just as pronounced when you go a step down the price scale to Thunder Burger, the Georgetown restaurant known for its wild-game specials. In the men’s room, you find a large mural of a playing card, the queen of hearts. The two cartoonish women depicted therein are entirely nude, save for the bright red flowers protruding from their nether regions.

“I feel that it’s the one area that most restaurateurs ignore because they think a bathroom is a bathroom. It just needs to be acceptable and clean. I find those bathrooms a bit boring,” says Thunder Burger co-owner H. Ben Kirane, also proprietor of the more upscale Spanish tapas restaurant Bodega, located just to the west on M Street NW. “My idea is, why should a trip to the bathroom be a boring experience when a little creativity can make for an interesting and memorable experience?”

Kirane’s bathrooms at Bodega feature a unisex common area. The décor reflects this. “We have a poster of flamenco dancers, male and female,” he explains. “She’s basically sitting on his lap in fishnet stockings. We cropped the picture so you can just see the legs.”

If the coed vibe in the bathroom is at all awkward, Kirane says the intimate image is quite the ice breaker. “I think it does encourage socializing and flirting, which is one of the reasons people go out in the first place,” he says.