Compare and Contrast: Light Filled Pho 88 Has Dark, Cave-Like Bathroom

Pho 88 Vietnamese Restaurant
730 N Mills Ave
Orlando, FL USA
www.pho88orlando.com

Where is it?

After entering, you will find yourself at the back of the dining room. Take an immediate right, down the white-walled hallway there and you'll come to the bathrooms, which are down that corridor.

What's it like?

One of the city's better Vietnamese restaurants and specialists in pho, the traditional soothing beef noodle soup that features a clear but well-seasoned beef broth (usually with star anise and rau ram, or Vietnamese coriander), rice noodles, slices of beef (usually lesser cuts that require a long simmer time to tenderize), and vegetables like onion, bean sprouts and chili. Few places in town can match this spot for pho, really.

The restaurant's decor itself is a bit campy. The back wall is made of mirrors, giving the place the impression that it's larger than it is. (Not that it's small -- there are about 50 tables here, along with a stretch bar that takes up most of the west wall.) Windows form the other two walls, giving the people sitting there decent looks of the busy street outside.

A half-wall divides the dining room in two and serves as a mounting place for many of the dining room's decorations, which include various ethnic trinkets. More items sit in or around the aforementioned bar. A large flat-screen hangs high on that mirror wall, usually televising a sporting event or karaoke. The atmosphere is usually festive and family oriented, though there are also several people who come here just to hang out and watch TV -- and to be honest, for watching a big football game, this place supplies a better setting than a sports bar. Fewer distractions, a more in-tune crowd that isn't as overtly boisterous and delicious food. Watching football with a big bowl of pho from Pho 88 before you is one of this life's great pleasures.

Service is attentive, if a little cold at times, but also speedy. Prices are wonderful -- most bowls of pho run $6-$7 dollars and the regular-sized bowls are enormous (the larger are the size of volcano craters). Other dishes worth getting include the rice noodle bowls, which come with various grilled meats and dipping sauces, and the Vietnamese crepe, a large flourless crepe (it's really just a long, thin omelet) stuffed with pork, shrimp and veggies -- delicious.

Given the amount of windows and mirrors found in the dining room, you half-expect the bathrooms to be somewhat light and airy. They aren't -- they're dark and cave-like. Similar to what was experienced at the Pulkovo International Airport in St. Petersburg, Russia, only without the looming grime and stink.

White tiles cover the walls here, with diamond pattern placed sporadically for accent. The floors are covered in standard large beige tile, like what we've seen at places like the Long Point Cafe and Greens and Grille.

There isn't much else of note to report here, decor-wise. The place has one urinal, one toilet in a stall and one sink -- all white porcelain and with the standard basic add-ons. Wall-mounted mirror with no frame, stick-to-the-wall soap dispenser. Kind of bland, really, like Sharky's Shrimp Shack or the aforementioned Long Point Cafe, just with a little more heart, thanks to those accent tiles.

The place is somewhat clean, though I did find a good number of paper towels on the floor and some spilled water, especially around the sink and toilet. More troubling was the paper towels stuffed behind the piping on the urinal, which hinted to me that there's a leak there that needs to be fixed.

Otherwise, the place's most discernible feature is its dim lighting -- not enough to make it hard to see but enough to make the place seem a little seamy, even underground. Quite a contrast, considering the light-filled, airy dining room.

Marks out of 10:

6. Good enough for a 6, but the potential of leaky plumbing keeps the score in check.

Comments to the Management:

Fix that plumbing -- or if there isn't a problem, at least make sure there isn't a paper towel behind any of the pipes. Also, please make it a little brighter in here.

Bathroom Doubles as Supply Closet at Memories of India

Memories of India
7625 Turkey Lake Rd
Orlando, FL 32819

Where is it?

From the front entrance, head inside. This places you at the front of the restaurant's small dining room, which contains about 20 or so tables.

With your back to the door, head along the left wall of the place, to the back left of the restaurant and down the corridor found in that corner of the establishment. Down that corridor is (in order of appearance) the waiter station (on the left), entrance to the kitchen (on the right), entrance to the bathrooms and -- further back -- more storage room.

The bathrooms themselves are off to the left a little, in a little enclave set off from this main passageway.

If you head too far back or get lost, just ask one of the friendly staff for help.

What's it like?

On the outside, this restaurant blends a little too seamlessly with the sterile facade of the strip mall in which its found. If you're not sure it's there, you might pass by it, thinking it was just a regular business. Inside, the place is filled with Indian art, soft lighting and smells of toasted spices. Which is what you expect from a decent Indian restaurant -- and this one is certainly one of the best in the Orlando area.

The food is well prepared, fresh and very vibrantly and evenly spiced -- few other Indian restaurants in town match it for its complexity of flavor, in my opinion. Some come close, but most tend to miss the mark, creating dishes that are too strong in one flavor and not substantial enough in another, thus ruining the balance of the cuisine. Here, there's a balance, at least I think so, and you taste it with each bite.

Prices are decent (about $15 per plate on average) and service is friendly and attentive. Plus it's one of the few ethnic restaurants in town where the waiters remember you from your last visit, even if you haven't been in a few months, and even if you have different waiters. I enjoy coming here.

Highlights include the fiery vindaloo lamb, the luscious chicken korma and the tandoori items, which come to the table perfectly grilled and moist (most places get the first part right but tend to dry out the meat).

The bathrooms here are a bit amusing in contrast to the careful preparation of the food. While they are located down a long hallway that contains many storage shelves and some storage rooms, the toilet here still double as a place to store items like cleaning supplies and toiletries, which makes me wonder how much storage space does one place need. Perhaps a lot?

Of course, we've seen bathrooms doubling as storage spots before, like at Pizzoodles (where the centerpiece of the bathroom is its storage cabinet) or the Holopaw Restaurant (where the hallway outside was filled with boxes, crates, canisters and more).

But I've never seen such an overtly high concentration of stored goods in a single public bathroom before. And there's a lot here: Cleaning liquids of all kinds, towels, a mop and bucket, a ladder.... in many ways, this is more a garage than a bathroom, if think about it.

Of course, at the same time, I must commend the place for keeping the environment organized -- not like what we saw at the awful CVS Pharmacy, HWY 80 in Savannah, which was just a bloody, smelly mess despite all the cleaning items found there. The place remains clean despite its duplicitous nature. On my first visit in one evening, I found the bathroom trash can loaded with paper towels; upon my second visit, those towels were gone. That means to me that they police the place well, and that's worthy of my admiration.

Still, because of all the cleaning fluids here, the place lacks a certain level of comfort you might expect from a regular restaurant bathroom -- especially from one where the dining room is so welcoming. While inside, you often get the feeling that if there's a major spill in the dining room or kitchen, someone will burst through the door and grab whatever materials are needed to solve that problem, no matter if you're busy or not.

Amenity-wise, the place is okay, though also a little piece-meal in assembly: This is a one-bagger, well-sized but also very sectioned, with a single toilet in the back, a sink in the middle and a urinal up front (all white porcelain). A dark blue with gold-trim linoleum tile covers the floor and part of the lower wall near the urinal (no doubt done to compensate for misfires). The mirror about the sink has a brown wood frame and looks like it was picked up at a garage sale.

Marks out of 10:

6.

Comments to the Management:

If possible, try storing those items elsewhere. If you can't, then perhaps you can shove everything into a more discrete spot -- no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't hide the impression that I was going to the bathroom in someone's garage -- so it feels more like a bathroom than a supply closet.

While this is, in my opinion, the best Indian restaurant in town food-wise, the toilets found at other Orlando Indian restaurants I've visited have an edge over this place: Ahmed, for example, is plain but singular and not as multipurpose (more in line with the bathrooms of Indian restaurants I've visited overseas, like the Monsoon in London, which I consider a standard in this category), and Anmol is just downright regal compared to this.

Bathroom at Long Point Cafe is Friendly and Familiar But also a Bit Bland

Long Point Cafe
100 Long Point Rd.
Melbourne Beach, FL USA
www.longpointcafe.com

Where is it?

This business has two independent storefronts to it. The larger is a convenience store/fish market which caters specifically to fishermen. The smaller is the cafe. This review is about the cafe's toilet, as the convenience store's bathroom was not visited.

To get to this bathroom, enter the cafe. Once you do, you enter the small dining room, which has about 10 - 15 tables at most. To the left is a small bar area. In the back left corner is the entrance to the kitchen. To the far right is a small hallway leading towards the opposite end of the restaurant.

Go down that hallway and you'll find the bathrooms -- men's room first, then the women's.

What's it like?

The restaurant here is a cozy establishment that many will find reminiscent of such home-style eateries as Howard Johnson or the Tamarisk Restaurant in Green River, UT. Green carpeting covers the floor. The tables are all wood with a light stain on them. The walls have some standard seafood restaurant decor on the walls (pics of fish, nets, etc.).

As stated, the store next door is a place that caters specifically to recreational fishermen. The deli counter there sells a lot of sandwiches, which you can take out with you on your boat, as well as other sundries for boaters and such. The fish market there sells some well-priced, and very fresh, catches, much of which is prepared well inside the the cafe's kitchen.

And this place serves some wonderful food that emphasizes the freshness of its ingredients. For breakfast, it prepares the usual diner fare, but with a seafood slant, such as a terrific Grouper Benedict. Lunch and dinner options also make excellent use of the fresh catches next door, including grilled snapper and grouper dishes, as well as some non-fish items (like a recent special that involved smoked pork butt). On occasion, the fish comes out a bit overcooked, but because the fish is this fresh, the flavor is not sacrificed.

Service is friendly and attentive, and prices are reasonable -- it's a great place to visit if you know about it (the restaurant's location is a bit hard to find if you're not familiar with the area -- it sits at the intersection of A1A and Long Point Rd., at the entrance to Long Point Park, a popular camping and boating launch park in the area) -- but it can be a bit hard to find if you don't know the area well.

The bathrooms in the restaurant are pretty standard fare. Clean, private, and functional, with a few touches of humor to extend the vibe of the dining room but not much beyond that. In many ways, my visit here reminded me of the pit stop I made at Sharky's Shrimp Shack in St. Augustine, which had equally clean and functional toilets that lack much in terms of design.

(I should say my companion visited the women's room and said there was some clever touches in there but I did not receive any additional information so I must keep it at that.)

This is a one-bagger with which drywall walls, standard white porcelain toilet, urinal and sink, flat wall-mounted mirror over the sink and off-white tiles on the floor. (Almost identical to Sharky's Shrimp Shack, really.)

There really isn't much else to it, except for a little stool set beside the toilet (which looks like it came from a child's toy kit) and a Billy Bass talking fish, which hangs above the toilet (and yes, I tested it to make sure it worked -- and it did).

Also, the paper towel dispenser had some humorous instructions on it, describing the steps on how to get a towel from it: "1. Push button. 2. Pull lever twice." Amusing enough, I guess.

Other than that, there isn't much else to report here. Just a typical, solidly pieced diner-inspired bathroom, nothing more.

Marks out of 10:

7.

Comments to the Management:

Nice, safe place. I wouldn't mind seeing more decor here. It doesn't have to get crazy (like Bongo Java or the World Famous Coffee Cup), but a little more creativity wouldn't hurt.

Restroom at Homey Holopaw Restaurant a Little Too Homespun

Holopaw Restaurant
Erlo Bronson Hwy (SR 192)
Holopaw, FL USA

Where is it?

Enter the restaurant. Once you do, you'll see the cashier counter to your immediate left, against the eastern wall of the building. To your right is the entire dining room.

From the main entrance, with your back to it, look across the way, to the back wall of the restaurant. There, you'll see a door facing you. On the door is a sign -- a piece of paper with some red handwriting, really, reading, "Hunter Special: ICE a 'Buck' a Bag." Above that sign is a sign for the men's room (not the ladies' room), and another sign reading, "Please keep this door closed."

Well, go through that door. Once you do, you enter a very dark hallway that contains a slew of storage items (supply closet, soft drink canisters, milk crates, etc.) as well as the bathrooms.

Turn right after you pass through the door (be sure to close the door behind you -- you don't want any trouble) and walk towards the other end of the hallway. The second door you come to will be the ladies' room, and the final door in the hallway (on the left) is the men's.

What's it like?

This roadside stop in this very small, middle-of-nowhere town looks and feels like one of those middle-of-nowhere diners you always see on TV shows in middle-of-nowhere places. And to be honest, that's essentially what the place is. The signs posted in it it hint that the clientele consists mostly of the few farmers that live in the area and hunters, who live to venture into the surrounding swamp for their kill.

It's also on SR 192, which is a semi-busy highway that leads visitors in St. Cloud or Kissimmee (and in that respects Disney) towards Florida's Atlantic beaches (192 dead-ends in Melbourne, which is about 20 minutes south of Cocoa Beach).

So given that, I imagine the place gets a decent amount of drive-by traffic (as was my case), but outside of that it's a locals establishment through and through. While inside, I was the only person who didn't seem to know the hostess by first name though that wasn't an issue at all. We were welcomed openly here.

The food here is your basic truck stop variety menu. Burgers, fried chicken, chicken fried steak, pot roast -- not quite diner end (though similar in some ways), but not quite a truck stop either, if you catch my drift.

The place also sells traditional Florida Cracker dishes, like fried turtle and gator, which I imagine is more for the tourists passing through than anything else. I don't know many Florida natives that actually eat these things willingly any more -- at festivals and as novelties, sure, but not since the advent of Publix, if you will). Also, the Cracker dishes were about double the price of everything else on the menu, which also leads me to the tourist idea.

Anyway, I had a hamburger, which was decent enough but forgettable. My companion had chicken fried steak, which didn't thrill her too much. Service was friendly and the place is friendly enough -- as hinted earlier, it's not one of those tough local spots where they look at you funny if you happen not to be one of the regulars. Still, outside of being a passing curiosity, I didn't see much here worth re-visiting.

And the state of the bathrooms kind of sealed the deal on that last sentiment as well. This is not a pleasant place to make a pit stop.

After heading down that long, dark hallway to the restroom itself (which really is the scariest trek I've made to a bathroom since visiting Kappy's or -- for entirely different reasons -- Famas Pizza) you find yourself in a decent-sized one-bagger room.

The walls here are painted concrete and pretty grimy. The floor is covered in that old-style of wood paneling that used to cover floors in the 70s, only it's split and coming apart in places, and the base boards seem to be peeling away from the walls. (Is the bathroom actually shrinking as I'm in it, I wondered? Again, some reminders of Kappy's.)

The door is your basic light white-painted wood variety, with a rusted latch across it, serving as its only lock (and you get the impression, while staring at it, that it's been a lock that's been busted open a few times). The light switch, beside the lock, is equally decrepit.

The toilet, sink and urinal are all your basic white porcelain models, though they are pretty worn down and stained in spots. The chrome plumbing coming out of them are all rusted over in spots and look like they need replacement soon.

The sink sits on one of those cabinet/sink uni-pieces that you can pick up cheap at the hardware store -- except this one looked like it was handed down over the generations. Or, at the very least, it was handed down to the place from Country Ham 'n' Eggs.

Also, some basic white tiles have been stuck to the wall behind the sink -- perhaps to aid with splashing or some sort. Not exactly decorative but a bit similar to what was accomplished at the Town House Restaurant, only that place pulled it off much, much better.

A trashcan filled with paper towels sat at the base of the sink cabinet. A slip of toilet seat covers hung above the toilet, along with a sign reading "Please put paper towels in the trash can" -- which of course made me question the nature of the sign some. Were people throwing paper towels in the toilet or were they throwing toilet seat covers in the trash?

Of course, the slip of toilet seat covers was empty, so I wondered if perhaps the latter were true. You never know, some times.

Also, the roll of toilet paper hanging on the wall was down to the nub -- and I imagined there was more paper under the sink I didn't feel comfortable looking inside to see.

Through all of this, the ceiling fan hanging above me twirled at high velocity, which made the place feel pretty breezy. Not as breezy as, say, Southwest Indian Traders, but not too far off.
In fact, the piece-meal construction here kind of had me thinking a lot of Southwest Indian Traders, only I think the owners and employees here actually use these toilets, where I have a good feeling the ones at Southwest Indian Traders are for clients and passers-by only.
If you're in the area and need to go and can't afford to turn back to Harmony (about 10 minutes westward on 192) or head on to Melbourne (about 20 minutes eastward), then skip this place's bathroom and go across the street to the town's gas station. It's not much of an improvement but it is a little better.

Marks out of 10:

2.
Comments to the Management:

Needs some serious renovation. I appreciate the homespun feel of the restaurant and the good nature of the staff, but this bathroom seems to take that a little too much too heart. A line must be drawn somewhere.

Toilet Out of Order? Not a Problem for Greens and Grille

Greens and Grille
4104 Millenia Blvd. Suite: 114
Orlando, FL USA
www.greensandgrille.com

Where is it?

There are two entrances to this restaurant. The first requires you to walk through an outdoor seating area to reach and puts you closer to the bathroom than the second entrance but further away from the order counter; here, you are placed in the center of the dining room, with the order counter to your far right and the bathrooms just a short walk to your left.

To reach them from this entrance, simply turn left after entering the dining room and head into the little corridor in the back of the business -- the bathrooms are there.

The second entrance places you at the back of the order counter queue -- great for ordering and viewing the menu but not so good for reaching the bathroom easily. Here, to reach the toilet, you need to cross the entire dining room, heading towards that same corridor in the back of the business.

What's it like?

This chic, terrific neighborhood salad joint, located in the strip mall in front of the Mall at Millenia, takes a little bit of effort to figure out. The menu hangs on the wall at the back entrance (see above) and features a slew of options, which essentially let you put together a sandwich or salad of your choosing. But there are so many combinations, both pre-set and make-your-own, that you feel a bit overwhelmed standing there.

Worse still is the fact that the menu is placed in a small half-wall corridor behind the dining area, and as you stand there, confused by all the options, other people come in and often there's a pile up, which of course causes more confusion.

However, once you figure it out for the first time, subsequent visits become much easier to handle -- and this is a place worth visiting multiple times, believe me, the food is that good. After selecting an order, you head to the end of that line, where you give your order to a cashier. From there, you proceed through a series of cooking stations, in which an attendant fills your order. There's a salad station, where salad ingredients and dressings are selected by the customer and hand mixed by an attendant, a grill station where your meats are prepared, a bread station, a bar and more.

Almost all the ingredients used in the food here come from local organic farms, and you can really taste the difference between the salads here over, say, the salads at a buffet like Sweet Tomatoes. The meats and breads and greens too taste very clean and full of flavor, even invigorating. And most dishes cost an average of $10, making the place affordable for both lunch and dinner. A true find. I stop by every time I'm in the area, I like it that much.

The restaurant's decor is pretty modern, with several industrial touches thrown in. Divider walls often carry a facade of pounded sheet metal, the tables and chairs are metallic, the counters black and sheen, and the walls pretty bare, save for the menu posters and a few pieces of art here and there and some decorative signs indicating the organic roots of their ingredients.

The bathroom -- two one-baggers, one of men and one for women -- extend that motif, but with cozier implications. The colors here are softer, with brown-orange upper walls, matted sheet metal lower walls, and a simple white porcelain sink (very bare bones, very standard), white porcelain toilet and metallic trash can. The sink features copper/bronze-metal faucets (a nice elegant add-on). The floor has large off-white tiles on it.

Across from the toilet is a small dark wood chest of drawers, on which stands a can of air spray (apparently, the people here aren't afraid of asking people to keep their own smell quotient down -- a similar idea we've also seen at places like Hale Groves, Pearl Restaurant and Polk's Fresh Market, among others), a box of tissues and a roll of paper towels. (Unfortunately, I didn't look inside.) There is also a dark wood square stool in front of the sink. These pieces were nice add-ons, I thought, some of the nicer pieces of furniture I've seen in a bathroom since my visit to Shiki at the Beach, which had a slew of Japanese woodwork in its one-bagger.

The walls have some framed paintings on them, which accentuate the cozy factor here. And the ceiling has a speaker built into it white pipes in the house music -- another nice touch since when I visited the corridor outside got a bit crowded because the men's room was out of order, but thanks to the music I felt like I had more privacy than I did and enjoyed myself more. It was a very good experience.

Also worth mentioning: When most places have one bathroom out of order, and are pretty busy, the remaining bathroom becomes an utter mess of spills and filth. (Heck, in some places, that's a given even with all the bathrooms are working, like my experiences at Sleuth's Dinner Theatre's Sherlock Theatre toilet, or at Maurice's BBQ in Santee, SC).

But that wasn't the case here. Despite the hordes of people, many of them who lined up the use the one toilet that was working here, the facilities themselves were very clean and odor free. Quite an accomplishment, I thought.

Marks out of 10:

8.

Comments to the Management:

Outside of fixing the other bathroom (which I'm sure has been done already), I've got nothing negative to say. This was a very good bathroom that was made all the more impressive by the way you successfully maintained it during a busy stretch and kept it very clean. Kudos.