Game of thrones: Blogger Bill Sands rates restaurant bathrooms

ALL YOU'VE got to do is punch the name of your favorite establishment into Google to realize just how many self-styled restaurant reviewers there are out there. Yelp. OpenTable. TripAdvisor. Urbanspoon. Blogs blogs blogs. Everyone's a critic, only half of them liked the scallop risotto and a fair contingent found the Nordic-inspired small plates to be "more miss than hit."

While plenty of people planning an evening out are able to rise above the e-racket caused by a bunch of overstuffed people screaming inside a tiny epicurean echo chamber, the question remains: How do those offering all these opinions distinguish themselves? It's about finding a voice and a niche. Bartender Bill Sands has achieved both, only it's bathrooms, not food, booze or service, that interest him the most.

On The Royal Flushing (theroyalflushing.com), Sands' Philly-based canon of commode critique, the Holland, Bucks County, native views the city's bars and restaurants through wide-open water-closet eyes. The short, snappy, frequently posted entries address a number of empirical categories, including handicap accessibility, cleanliness and well-stocked towels and TP.

But it might be the final, difficult-to-define rating, aptly titled "Amazingness," that truly captures the spirit of Sands' endeavor. (More on that later.)

Sands, 32, shakes cocktails, pours wine and makes nice at Tinto and Bar Ferdinand, but he logged plenty of experience in other industries before really leaping into the food world. A lifelong skater, he started out hanging and working at G-Spot, a skate and snowboard shop in Fairless Hills. After studying psychology for a few years at Ocean County College and Temple, he went to work at the Philadelphia Zoo, operating the hot-air balloon.

Relationships from the zoo gig led him to a position building-out restaurants in upstate New York, which helped Sands found a construction business with his younger brother. The duo kept plenty busy with rehab and renovation projects - work that, yes, included building-out bathrooms.

The first local restroom that Sands remembers being enthralled by was the one at Old City's long-closed Tangerine. (Scanning his brain for a year, he couldn't nail one down, but he knows for sure that it "was so long ago, I was drinking Long Island Iced Teas.")

The beauty of that ultra-john caused Sands to begin chasing the lavatory dragon, examining the offerings of every bar or restaurant he visited with great curiosity. "Every time we went somewhere, I'd say, 'Oh man, did you see the bathroom?' " he said.

While pretty much everyone, whether they're sitting in front of a laptop or across from you at the table, has thoughts to share about what's going on in a restaurant's dining room, Sands found complementary value in the clandestine nature of the ladies' and gents'. "They're little secret places that could potentially be awesome," said Sands, observing a bathroom's ability to bring the overall appeal of an establishment full circle.

Taking a self-imposed break from skating earlier this year, Sands found himself with a little extra time on his hands, and "all these ideas started flooding in," he said. One of them was Royal Flushing, a public venue to host his favorite service-industry conversation topic.

Sands rates each WC on a scale of zero to five flushes - fractional 0.5 and 0.75 numbers are permitted, for precision purposes - sharing his observations in a loose, energetic writing voice very similar to his style of face-to-face engagement.

"Restaurants are unique little worlds created for people to take a short vacation from their lives," he writes in his mission statement. "Well, sometimes, you need a vacation from your vacation. Maybe Bob or Beverly's best bud is talking too much."

Providing a brief and comfortable respite from the feed-me hubbub is what a restaurant restroom is all about, in Sands' eyes. That's what makes vibe and visuals so important to his criteria. "Atmosphere is very important," he said. "I try to perform a fair assessment as far as everything else goes, but I think the overall aesthetic can majorly sway a restroom."

This is the appeal bottled up in his "Amazingness" analysis. The Garage, on Passyunk? "A pleasant surprise." The Continental Old City? "Pretty amazing." Rittenhouse's Rouge? Nice, in an "Alice in Wonderland/Twin Peaks/Twilight Zone sorta way."

To observe Sands' process firsthand, we got together last week for drinks at four different Center City establishments, a few of which you can already read about online.

At the long-popular El Vez, which Sands remembered as a toilet of note from years ago, the critic found himself peering behind the dark blue curtains surrounding the communal area, a decor touch he said lent the room the feel of a "little '70s lair." He found the behind-closed-doors facilities clean, if unremarkable, but nodded to the sink-appointed vestibule's "potential for awkward social situations, which I like."

Across 13th Street, at Michael Schulson's Sampan, Sands was wowed by the slick Asian-esque touches and recessed lighting, as well as the looped recordings of famous movie quotes ("Pulp Fiction," "The Shawshank Redemption") pumping through the speakers in the private stalls. "I felt like they took a lot of time to design it," he observed.

At the Farmers' Cabinet, a Walnut Street haven for craft beer and cocktail lovers, the pre-Prohibition Era feel of the bar artfully spilled over into the downstairs "toittys" (Sands' slang for toilet).

Old-timey photos indicating the men's and women's rooms, a 1920s soundtrack and cloth napkins, complete with wooden barrel bin for spent ones, were all "in keeping with the tone of the restaurant," he said.

Our last stop was considerably down-market from the others in the best way - the relaxed, hazy Locust Bar, where we caught shots of whiskey, pitchers of Kenzinger and Thursday Night Football.

Though the extremely narrow doorway to the bar's men's room could pose a challenge to larger patrons, according to Sands, "I thought it was amazing how good it smelled in there. But I don't know if it was just because of the cigarette smoke on the outside."

Sands has been running The Royal Flushing for only a few months, and he considers himself lucky that he has yet to meet a bathroom "too gnarly" to consider. But maybe you have - he's just launched a reader-submission feature that he hopes will foster a sense of Philly commode community. "The real dream of the website," he said, "would be if everybody could participate."