Palatial pitstop: 1st floor ladies room at Baltimore's Tremont Grand.

by ERIKA NIEDOWSKI
The word is out: Baltimore is home to one of 10 finalists in the “America’s Best Restroom” contest, an annual competition to find the country’s kingliest of commodes and most lavish of loos.

In the running for this year’s top prize – bragging rights and a spot in the ABR Hall of Fame, for what that’s worth – is the first-floor ladies restroom at the Tremont Grand. (What’s up with the men’s room?) It’s been cited by contest officials as a “must-see Maryland attraction” with top features including “extensive use of imported marble, grand columns, chandeliers and hand-carved woodwork.”

The city might not want to get its hopes too high just yet, though; the competition looks stiff.

The restroom at the Shoji Tabuchi Theatre in Branson, Missouri, sports a hand-carved mahogany pool table, leather chairs and lion’s head sinks. The Canlis Restaurant in Seattle, Washington, offers a “Zen-like atmosphere” with organic wall coverings and big picture windows overlooking a garden. The restroom at Macy’s department store in San Francisco’s Union Square (6th floor, women’s) is Art Deco and has full-length stainless steel doors.

Other finalists are Radio City Music Hall in New York; Zeffirino Ristorante at the Venetian Resort and Hotel in Las Vegas; the Drake Hotel’s Palm Court ladies room in Chicago; the Tampa Theatre in Tampa, Florida; NOVA 535 in St. Petersburg, Florida; and the Fox Theatre in Detroit.

The contest, which began in 2001, is put on by Cintas, which is in the business of keeping restrooms clean, because someone has to. The firm cites polling data that show 65 percent of customers will not return to an establishment if its restrooms are dirty.

Must-haves for a premium potty experience: big orchid, real marble

Public restrooms can indeed be a godsend in a moment of need. But cleanliness counts. George Costanza, on Seinfeld, kept a mental list of Manhattan’s best public toilets. (We seem to remember him liking the
one at the Metropolitan Opera house at Lincoln Center.)

People do the same in real life: there is an iPhone app called – apologies ahead of time – SitOrSquat that will, according to developer Jonathan Glanz, “get you to the bathroom that you so desperately need as quickly as is humanly possible.”

The Bathroom Diaries is a nine-year-old website that bills itself as the world’s largest database of public restrooms. It has ratings of over 12,000 bathrooms in more than 100 countries and prints travelers’ essays on the topic. It even holds a global “best bathroom” contest.

But back to the American finalists.

“These washrooms,” the contest website says, “are testaments to their proprietors’ sense of taste, flair and attention to detail, and feature some of the world’s finest materials and customer comforts as well as a few surprises.”

Now, we admit to liking customer comforts. But personally, this Brew writer prefers to limit the number of surprises when it comes to the lavatory.