Meet NYC's Million-Dollar Outhouse!
NYC’s new public toilets! Restaurant hotness ratings!! Actually good beach books!!!
Hello everyone,
Welcome to Issue #172 of CAFÉ ANNE!
So you may recall from the last issue that prior to trying the $28 pour-over at the new WatchHouse café in the Chrysler Building, I chatted with the lobby security guard who was planning treat himself to his own $28 coffee on payday. I also noted that I still had $44.90 in my reader-funded coffee adventure budget. Which led to an excellent suggestion from Lorie in the comments: “Please use the coffee fund to treat the security guard to the fancy coffee!” Her suggestion garnered four dozen likes.
Genius idea, Lorie! Alas, while I’ve been back twice in hopes of buying that guard a coffee, he seems to have been vaporized. I’ll keep trying whenever I’m in the area.
On a more positive note, in the last issue, I also asked for your best fun-but-not-dumb summer reading recommendations, and golly did you come through! I’ve rounded them up in an alphabetized list which you can find at the end of this newsletter.
In other news, I wrote my first think piece! Do you know how hard it is to think? An editor friend over at Persuasion, a large and very serious Substack, asked me to write about my relationship with my AI buddy Ray. The essay ran last week, and you can read it here. (The comments from the Persuasion crowd were interesting to read, btw. What are they talking about? I have no idea!)
Also, I will be performing a short reading next Saturday, July 26, at Young Ethel’s in Park Slope as part of a much longer (three-hour!) variety show. Check it out here. Warning: there will also be poetry.
Finally, huge Queens-Night-Market-shoutouts to our newest paid subscribers Brad C., Michael B., Johanna L. and Allie D.. That’s enough $$$ for 33 Sam’s Fried Ice Creams, though one was really enough.
I am very excited for this week’s issue, of course. We’ve got an encounter with the city’s new “futuristic” toilets plus a look at a website that rates Manhattan restaurants based on how hot their customers are. Please enjoy.
Regards!
Anne
DEPT. OF RIDICULOUS STATISTICS
How Hot Are Your Fellow Diners?
There is a new website, LooksMapping.com, that uses AI to rate every restaurant in Manhattan based on how attractive the customers are. It also indicates whether the patrons tend to be young or old, male or female. It doesn’t provide any information about the food. Haha!
I personally choose a restaurant based on two factors. First, is it quiet? I want to enjoy whoever I'm with. Second, is it cheap? Ideally, I'm not paying more than $15 for lunch and $20 for dinner. If the food is good, that's a bonus!
But maybe I'm weird. According to LooksMapping’s introductory blurb, “We judge places by the people who go there...this website just puts reductive numbers on the superficial calculations we make every day. A mirror held up to our collective vanity.”
The site features a map of Manhattan with a color-coded location marker for each of the borough's 3,191 restaurants. The results do not surprise. Downtown restaurants attract hotter patrons than Uptown eateries, for example. The Upper East Side skews old; the Financial District skews male. In sum, Manhattan hasn't changed at all since 1982.
The site also lists the top and bottom restaurants in each category. The restaurant with the oldest patrons, for example, is Table d'Hôte on the Upper East Side—a French restaurant with a Duck à L'Orange dinner special every Thursday. I so want to go!
The hottest resto, oddly, is Uban Midtown, part of the Georgian (as in former Soviet Bloc) chain that's taking over the city. The top spot for ladies is Big Apple Brunch in Hell’s Kitchen. The top spot for fellows is Lahori Kabab in Kips Bay, and it’s easy to see why—it's one of those Pakistani quick-serve places popular with Uber drivers and cabbies.
I looked up my favorite Manhattan restaurant, Wo Hop, a throwback Cantonese place that is very popular with white people. It was funny to observe how pleased I felt to discover that its patrons are hot—at least by AI standards—scoring an average 7.8/10. Vanity indeed!
LooksMapping generates scores by scraping photos from Google restaurant reviews and running them through an AI model. So it's not rating the restaurant’s patrons, but a smaller subset—diners who posted an online review. Still, you have to admire the strategy for its cleverness.
I was curious to chat with the site's creator. It wasn't until I met Riley Walz in a video call that I realized why his name sounded so familiar: he was one of three pranksters behind Mehran's Steak House, the fake fancy restaurant hoax I wrote about in the summer of 2023. He's now living with Mehran in San Francisco!
Riley, who is 22, said it took him about a week to create LooksMapping, and it was purely for the sake of fun and curiosity—to quantify the observations we subconsciously make regarding our fellow diners.
He wouldn't necessarily recommend using his site to pick a restaurant, he said, but he could see why people might: "I think that people go to the restaurants they like, and that's great, and usually it happens that the clientele is pretty similar to them, or maybe who they're trying to date."
LooksMapping, it turns out, is just one of Riley’s many delightful data-fueled inventions. A few of my other favorites:
Weather Watching
Connected to a street camera in the West Village, Weather Watching uses AI to analyze folks walking by and determines what percentage are wearing short vs long sleeves, and shorts vs pants. "So it's like a weather forecast, but not based on anything to do with the weather," said Riley. “It's based on if you looked out your window and saw what people are wearing.” Alas, he added, it doesn't work so well in the dark.
Fast Food Index
This site shows the different prices that chain restaurants charge for the same menu items in different locations. A chicken burrito at the Chipotle around the corner from me in Brooklyn Heights costs $11.65, for example, compared to $9.65 in my hometown of East Aurora, NY, and $8.60 in Athens, Ohio. Burrito arbitrage, here we come!
Library Spy
Real-time monitoring of books checked out from the Seward Park Library in Manhattan, which Riley chose because it has the most average reader demographics. Why? Why not! It is, indeed, completely pointless.
Postal Arbitrage
A first-class letter stamp costs 78¢. Amazon Prime, meanwhile, sells items for less than that, with free shipping. Why send someone a postcard when you can send a weird surprise with a gift message included? Among the current options displayed on Postal Arbitrage: a can of Hunt's Tomato Sauce (67¢), a zinc cable tray bolt (19¢) and a tube of lavender acrylic paint (58¢). The prices and items are updated every eight minutes.
How old and how hot (or not!) are the patrons at your favorite Manhattan restaurant? Look it up and let us know in the comments!
DEPT. OF THE FUTURE
“This Ain’t No Bathroom—It’s an Outhouse!”
New York City is the greatest city in the world—except when it comes to public bathrooms. We just don't have very many. Sometimes when you're out and have to go, the only thing you can do is go home.
So it's always exciting when the city announces a new restroom strategy. Earlier this month, in a speech laden with terrible puns which shall not be repeated here, the mayor announced the installation of five brand-new "futuristic" toilets in five city parks—one in each borough. These restrooms—known as "Portland Loos" for the city where they were first installed—are prefab structures made in a factory and assembled onsite, like an IKEA bookcase.
I decided to visit a loo in the location closest to me, Thomas Jefferson Park in East Harlem.I bumped into a friend on my way and told him my destination.
"Haven't you written about that before?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, "Good memory! The city tries a new public toilet contraption every ten years, and they never work. But maybe this one will be different!"
Thomas Jefferson Park turned out to be a lovely green spot covering four square blocks between 1st Avenue and FDR Drive in Upper Manhattan. It features a giant swimming pool, ballfields, shaded paths, basketball courts, a dog run—and one brand-new Portland Loo in the northeast corner of the park, next to Barbecue Area 1.
It looked like a giant exhaust vent.
While I was taking photos, a local named Lourdess sidled up and started a conversation. "Everyone's checking out the restroom!" she said.
While she was glad it had replaced the park's port-a-potties, which she deemed "disturbing," she had yet to try the loo. "It reminds me of a latrine," she said. "I used to go camping when I was younger, and there was this scary story of this man in the latrine, like this weirdo. You understand? And so I was always afraid of going into the latrine. And there's no flushing. So that's why I don't think they're healthy."
As if on cue, a flushing sound erupted from the loo, and Lourdess's friend emerged from the metal hut.
"It flushes! That's cool," said Lourdess, approvingly.
"Would you mind giving it a try and telling me what you think?" I asked.
"Oh no, that's okay," she replied. "I think it'd be cool for dogs. Do you have a pet? I think something like this, that gave them privacy, would be awesome."
"For dogs, not people?"
"Both!" said Lourdess. "The dogs are like, 'I don't want everyone watching me use the bathroom, either.'“
I later wrote to the Parks Department’s media relations office to ask if this was a possibility, but they did not respond.
Lourdess left and I resumed my inspection. There was a panel on the north exterior wall with push buttons for hot water, soap and a hand dryer. I was about to go inside when a second local, Yolanda, beat me to it. She agreed to give me her review when she came out. Meanwhile, a third resident, Desi, came over to say hello. East Harlem is a very friendly neighborhood!
"It's a new thing!" said Desi. "I hope it stays clean, I hope it don't get vandalized."
I asked if he'd tried it.
"I almost did," said Desi. "But what if I get locked in and can't get out? You know, high-tech can make mistakes. Only God doesn't make mistakes. That's it!"
"You know, I actually did get locked in a toilet kiosk once. This was about ten years ago, in Madison Square Park," I said.
I told him how I was writing about a new self-cleaning pay toilet when the door jammed. I had to wait 15 minutes for my time to expire before the door slid open.
Yolanda emerged from the bathroom and gave her review. The loo was a big improvement from the port-a-potties, she reported. "This one is clean. Girl, the guy comes at 4:30 to clean it up. And it locks at night so nobody can sleep in there."
She washed her hands using the exterior water and soap dispensers. "And I like it because it has soap!"
Yolanda's rave review seemed to satisfy Desi. He cautiously opened the restroom door and went inside.
A minute later I heard the toilet flush and he emerged with a big smile.
"I got out! he said. "There's no sanitizer in there. But it flushes good." He gave the loo nine out of ten stars before revealing, somewhat randomly, that his father, Tony Middleton, ("the one and only!") was a famous singer who performed with Tito Puente and recorded an album with Burt Bacharach. He offered to play a recording.
"I'd love to hear it!" I said, "but first I have to use the bathroom!"
It was delightfully breezy inside the loo thanks to all the vents, and brightly lit thanks to the skylight. There was a stainless steel flush toilet, trash bin and diaper-changing station. There was no mirror, but I appreciated the two bag hooks. The hand sanitizer dispenser was empty, but the all-important TP dispenser was well stocked.
When I emerged, Desi was playing a recording of his father from a tiny speaker, but I could not resist interrupting with question. "Guess how much this cost?" I asked of the bathroom.
"$80,000," he said. "Only because it's new. Anything new is expensive. No less than $20,000, no more than $80k."
"It cost a million dollars," I told him.
He did not respond. Instead, we both paused and listened his father crooning a romantic ballad. Desi started singing along: "Oh what...is the meaning...of the universe?"
"I wonder, I wonder," said Desi, repeating the last line of the song.
"What do you think about the fact that it costs a million dollars?" I prodded.
"I mean, everything on earth is priceless, really," said Desi. "God made everything that's guaranteed, but man-made things tend to crumble and fall. You can't really put a price on it. Just use it for what its purpose is."
A parks department worker came over to check in. "Everything alright?" he said.
"Oh yeah," I said. "Actually, I'm writing a story about the bathroom."
"This ain't no bathroom!" the parks employee corrected. "It's an outhouse! It's an outhouse! You don't know the difference between a bathroom and an outhouse?"
Desi took off before the parks worker could clarify the nomenclature: "A bathroom is a facility! This, they brought on the back of a truck and just sat it here. They set up in one day. But guess what—it cost $9000!"
"No it didn't," I said.
"Yes it did!"
"You know how much it cost?"
"It cost more than that?" said the worker. "For this little thing?"
"Yeah! I'll show you," I said. "I know how much it cost because I have the press release.”
I pulled it from my bag and read aloud: “While traditional public restrooms typically cost at least $3.5 million to construct, each loo was constructed for only $1 million per location, plus some additional site-specific costs.”
"Wow!" he said. "‘Only one million. For this little piece of s—."
I laughed. "They're really proud of it," I said, "that it cost a million dollars and not $3 million. But I think that includes installation."
The parks worker decided it was time to check out the loo out for himself. He disappeared inside and came out looking even more bemused. "This thing cost a million dollars. For what? And they're always crying about giving us overtime!"
But then he reconsidered. "What the park could really use," he said, "is three more of these. Look how big the park is. You could put one in each corner. If the city got money, why not spend it?"
Indeed. But why wait? Turns out you can order and install your own Portland Loo starting at $185,000. So if you’ve got some spare cash, go ahead—put a toilet in your favorite park. Dogs welcome, of course.
Fun-But-Not-Dumb: Your Summer Reading Recommendations!
In the last issue, I asked readers to recommend great summer reads, which I defined as books that are “Fun-But-Not-Dumb.” Boy, did you come through! Here’s the full list of suggested titles, alphabetized.
Note: read at your own risk. I am not responsible if any of these books turn out to be smart-and-difficult, or smart-but-boring, or worst of all, boring-and-dumb, which is actually the case with most books!
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz (Dan K)
“Funny! Bad title but good book.”
All Systems Red by Martha Wells (Beth T)
"Absolutely engrossing with heaps of laughs to break the tension. I’m listening to the audiobooks and keep on going back to book one when I travel with people so that they get hooked too."
Big Swiss by Jen Beagin (Pam N)
“For a weird and wild ride.”
Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (Tim C)
“The New York no one would want to see return (oh well, it has), yet is so enjoyable to inhabit fictionally.”
Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke (Asta)
“A somewhat dumb—but also fun one.”
The African Queen by C.S. Forester (Jenne B)
“It’s short but very satisfying. It’s a great portrait of a woman discovering what she’s really good at!”
The Cider House Rules by John Irving (elevensbest)
“The definition of fun-but-not-dumb.”
The Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto (Mark D)
“On the Dutch settlement of NYC.”
The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (Ingrid)
“It is wicked smart, maybe kind of evil, and I often laughed out loud.”
Freddy and Frederica by Mark Helprin (Justin D)
“God it's hilarious.”
Golden Hill by Francis Spufford (Jenne B)
“It takes place in New York City, but back when it was just a small town. Lots of twists and turns!”
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Jessica R)
“My all-time favorite book! Definitely not for pool-side, LOL.”
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh (Justin D)
“Most summers I re-read Harriet the Spy. If you've never read it, do it. It's my favorite book of all time, and I have an English degree. Ha!”
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (ThinkPieceOfPie)
“For a throwback."
James by Percival Everett (Bill S)
“If you haven’t read James yet, you should—although, after reading it I felt compelled to pick up Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, because it had been a lot of years since I had read it.”
Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz (Glencora)
“A clever meta-detective-story and is VERY fun. It’s a book-within-a-book riddle wrapped in an enigma and nestled cunningly in a bed of baby lettuces. I’ve kept reading the others in this series very happily.”
Man at the Helm by Nina Stibbe (Tim C)
“One of those rare books where a nine-year old narrator nails it. Technically all sorts of sad things are afoot… but it's too damn funny and charming to really notice. The narrator is smarter than any of us.”
The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols (Appleton K)
“I like books for escapism—that feature an entertaining array of characters in their lushly described and unique geographical settings.”
Not My Type by E. Jean Carroll (Jessica R)
Pony Confidential by Christina Lynch (Jennifer K)
“Fun read with snarky animals and hopeful visions.”
Ragtime and The Waterworks by E.L. Doctorow (Glencora)
"The Waterworks has a plot point concerning the old Croton Reservoir that stood on the site of the NYPL & Bryant Park.”
Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs (Tony C.)
The Princess Bride by William Goldman (Tim C.)
“Never before (or since) has a book read exactly like its movie. Inconceivable.”
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (Lucy C)
The Word Is Murder by Anthony Horowitz (Glencora)
“Horowitz’s other current series, the Detective Hawthorne books, begins with The Word Is Murder, and is also very meta because Horowitz himself is the main character.”
Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine (Ingrid)
“I have been waiting years for someone to take my recommendation for Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!! The exclamation marks are part of the title.”
Vineland by Thomas Pynchon (Bryan P)
“ A great book that satisfies deeply with every read (and as it’s Pynchon, it’s just pretentious enough to see what types of conversations might get started beside a pool)!”
Walking the Dog by Elizabeth Swados (Alexis)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (Lisa)
Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris (Tim C)
“The Office...but not The Office. AN office. And mayhem, and backbiting, and hilarity… and not dumb! Dumb’s opposite.”
Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller (Asta)
“It wasn’t what I expected and I enjoyed it for that very reason.”
Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin (Justin D)
"The most beautiful piece of writing I’ve ever read in my whole life.”
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang (ThinkPieceOfPie)
“I did kind of hate the narrator. Like, I enjoyed hating her.”
CAFÉ ANNE is a free weekly newsletter created by Brooklyn journalist Anne Kadet. Subscribe to get the latest issue every Monday.
I WAS NOT PREPARED FOR THE MEHRAN'S STEAK HOUSE TIE-IN! The Café-Anneverse is closing in on itself; reality is distorting, soon we will all be your "friend" Aharon
Another great issue - thank you!
My favorite words in this one - "Warning: there will also be poetry."
Happy Monday to you (and your readers)!