Where Is the Toilet

In the basement of a restaurant that belongs to a larger Zurich restaurant group, I stood between two doors facing each other. The same sign on both. At the top a word in an Asian script, below it «toilet», below that a grid of twenty-eight symbols. Mars, Venus, Mars with Venus, Venus with Venus, three circles inside one another, a circle with a question mark, a circle crossed out, a wheelchair in the middle of it all. I recognised about half. None of them told me which door was mine.

Fifteen years in the restaurant trade, and I stood in front of two doors as if in front of an exam. Not because the idea was foreign to me. Unisex toilets exist in every second café. What was foreign was the sign: a plaque that says «toilet» and underneath gives twenty-eight answers to a question I had not asked. Then it dawned on me: both doors were for everyone. The grid did not say who may go in. It said that everyone may go in, in a language you first have to learn. For a moment it felt like passing an intelligence test, except that it was not intelligence being tested but whether you are up to date. I opened one, with a slightly bad conscience, and was relieved that nobody was inside. I washed my hands faster than usual.

As I stepped out, a woman was standing in front of me. Asian, mid-thirties, with the look of someone who had been standing in front of the signs for a while. She asked, in English, where the ladies' was. I said that presumably both doors were fine, that this was the custom here now. She nodded the way you nod when you have understood nothing and do not want to ask again. She had failed. She had asked the question you no longer ask.

Upstairs I enquired whether the toilets were in fact meant the way I had understood them, and whether they considered that clear enough. There was a woman downstairs right now who did not know where to go. The answer came without a pause and without a glance. Gender-neutral. One word, in the tone of a recorded announcement. It was not the person who answered me, it was the word. The woman downstairs did not appear in it.

I have nothing against gender-neutral toilets. My objection is not to the concept. It is to the sign.

A sign on a door has exactly one job. It addresses the person who does not know the house. Signs are for strangers. As soon as a sign becomes a statement, it stops being a sign. The word «toilet» was there, admittedly. But nobody in front of a toilet door looks at the word. The eye looks for the pictogram, that is how it has been trained for fifty years, and it found twenty-eight. Whoever offers twenty-eight symbols is not saying «everyone». They are saying «pick one». Two identical doors with twenty-eight symbols are not inclusive. They are a puzzle.

A measure that wants to exclude nobody addresses everyone. Whoever addresses everyone means nobody in particular. And whoever means nobody in particular can no longer show anybody the door. The grid wants to depict every identity and therefore no longer depicts a door. The openness creates a threshold precisely where there was none before. The woman between the two doors is not the exception to inclusion. She is its result.

In passing: in the canton of Zurich, establishments with fifty seats or more have had to provide separate toilets since 1982. In 2023 the cantonal government wanted to keep it that way, out of regard for women's safety. In 2025 the cantonal parliament voted to relax the rule, with the Liberals, the Swiss People's Party and the Social Democrats, against the concerns of the Green Liberals and the Greens. Anyone who thinks they know where the lines run in this country should read the voting records now and then.

The same restaurant group no longer accepts cash. It discloses its pay system, has a sustainability report, hydroelectric power, free tap water, an audited equal-pay analysis and several dozen leadership principles. I counted those too. There are forty-eight.

I am not listing this to make fun of it. Most of it is respectable, some of it better than what I manage myself. I list it because, taken together, an attitude becomes visible that you cannot see in any single item.

A house with forty-eight leadership principles has a notion of how to lead correctly. A house without cash knows how to pay correctly. A house with twenty-eight symbols on the toilet door knows how to go to the toilet correctly. In all of these questions the establishment already knows what is good, and the guest is welcome to learn it.

Hospitality tips over at this point into something else. Not into hostility, everything is far too well organised for that. More like education.

And the price for it is rarely paid by those who set it. Only those who pay with cash have anything against cashlessness: the older woman, the child with its pocket money, the person who would rather not have their supper in a database. They are not many. They are simply no longer meant. Anyone who just wants a drink is, in some places, no longer meant either. A seat is calculated per hour, and a beer fits badly into that sum. Yet for centuries the Beiz, the ordinary Swiss local, was the place where you were allowed to sit without having a programme. Like a bench in the park, only warm.

Add to this that the restaurant trade rarely takes up the spirit of the age calmly. It seeks it out, and it seeks it out strenuously. The menu goes vegan, the tap water becomes a statement, ordering runs through a QR code on the table, the toilet goes neutral, and each of these moves presents itself as a stance before it has proved itself in daily use. Yet the inn was for a long time the place where time ran a little slower than outside. Today it runs faster there. An establishment that follows every turn does not come across as open. It comes across as breathless.

This is not a conspiracy of the woke zeitgeist. It is more banal, and therefore more interesting: attitude and calculation point in the same direction remarkably often. The neutral toilet is a sign of openness and saves a washroom. Cashlessness is a sign of transparency and saves the till. It is not that such establishments lie. It is that their values and their figures contradict each other remarkably rarely.

That leaves pay transparency, the real test. A disclosed pay system is more radical in this trade than any door sign, and it costs the establishment something. I know few restaurateurs who could stand it, and I am not sure about myself.

Then you read how the enquiry works in practice. Anyone who wants to know a colleague's pay fills in a form: their own staff number, their own name, plus the name, branch and position of the person in question. The personnel office then calls back and states the figure over the phone. Nothing is handed out in writing.

You can justify this with data protection, and the justification is not bad. It remains the case that whoever exercises the right registers by name, names the person they want to know about, and receives the answer orally, from the office that also sets the pay. The principle is open. The way to it leads through the office.

It is the same movement as downstairs at the door. Something is granted to everyone and arranged in such a way that exercising it takes a little courage. The openness is real. It just has a counter in front of it.

Hospitality is not an attitude you explain. It is a question you answer. «Where is the toilet» is one of the oldest of these questions. The guest is, by definition, the one who does not know the house, and everything a host does is to translate the house for someone entering it for the first time. A house that explains its values better than its rooms has reversed the direction. The house no longer explains itself to the guest. The guest has to understand the house.

The woman will have told the story to someone, wherever home is for her. The door with twenty-eight symbols on it and none for her. What I would have liked to tell her was more honest: that her question has no answer here, only an attitude. Fifteen years in this trade, and I had nothing better to offer her than a guess.

She thanked me. As I climbed the stairs, she was still standing between the two doors.

Translated from the German.