A chic downtown restaurant has flushed bathroom attendants down history’s sewer pipe.
Managers at Soho’s Balthazar said Monday they’re wiping bathroom valets off their payroll after business-news blogger Henry Blodget made snippy comments about the antiquated, “extortion-by-guilt” practice.
Blodget, a disgraced Wall Street analyst who now edits the Business Insider Web site, wrote last week that dealing with bathroom attendants is “never anything other than uncomfortable and degrading.”
Blodget’s post came after dining at Balthazar — and the restaurant’s owner, Keith McNally, said he agreed.
“Unfortunately, I completely agree with it and will, in the next few weeks, relieve the restaurant’s bathroom attendants of their duties,” McNally wrote in an e-mail to the FirstWeFeast food Web site, later on adding that bathroom attendants would be reassigned to new jobs.
The restaurant big took a pot shot at Blodget, who in 2003 agreed to leave the securities industry and pay fines to settle fraud allegations.
“What’s more, to receive such high-minded advice from a man who’s been charged with civil securities fraud by the US Securities and Exchange Commission is a bit like receiving a lesson in business ethics from Bernie Madoff,” sniped McNally, adding that his bathroom staffers “are lovely people and I’d like to work with them forever.”
The men’s bathroom attendant working the lunch rush on Monday said he’d been told his days at Balthazar were numbered. The 30-something man, who spoke little English, said he hadn’t been given a precise termination date.
A Post reporter was asked to leave the restaurant — but returned an hour later to find the men’s bathroom with no attendant and the valet’s set of toiletries gone.
Now customers will have to find their own cologne, mouthwash, moisturizer, hair gel, toothpicks, and dental floss.
“As a dentist, I appreciate the dental floss,” said customer Bart Morrison, a tourist from Idaho Falls. “We don’t get things like that in Idaho. And if you get some pulled pork or something stuck in your teeth, it’s nice to have that floss there.”
Another Balthazar customer, Andreas Engelstad — a 41-year-old art-gallery curator from Oslo — said bathroom attendants are also a thing of the past in his native Norway.
“It’s kind of nice, but not very necessary,” said Englestad, in town for New York City Marathon that he finished in a blazing 3:29:48.
“There used to be bathroom attendants in Norway, but now they’re all gone. The most uncomfortable part for me is that I never have single dollar bills.”
After leaving the bathroom, Englestad broke a larger bill and had singles to tip. But by the time he returned to the men’s washroom, the bathroom attendant and all his tools had vanished.
Englestad beat himself up: “[Expletive], I should have given him a $5 bill.”