From Dining to Flushing: This Belgian Guide Serves the Full Experience
- François Remy
- Sep 30
- 3 min read
Created by a gastronomy-loving couple from Liège with a background in facility management, Wow-resto claims the title of Belgium’s first culinary guide to feature a dedicated quality index for restrooms.
“Offering a new way to choose a restaurant: more reliable, more transparent, more human.” That’s the goal set by Bénédicte Lejeune and Alain Delahaut, a close-knit duo from Theux, with their brand new recommendation site wow-resto.com. Their mission? To offer customers an experience free of unpleasant surprises – or rather, to give them a good reason to exclaim, “Wow, it’s clean!”
Developed by Facility Web Experience, the company they launched last January specializing in facility management (quality and performance of infrastructure), the Wow-resto platform claims to aggregate and analyze hundreds of customer reviews from third-party websites using AI, and present them in the form of concise rating sheets.
“But what really makes us unique is our dedicated restroom rating. We’ve built concrete, useful criteria so everyone’s comfort is taken into account,” explain Bénédicte and Alain. Their service supplements traditional restaurant reviews by evaluating often-overlooked factors such as cleanliness, environment, hygiene, accessibility for people with reduced mobility (PRM), and the presence of baby-changing stations—elements that significantly impact overall customer satisfaction.
Restrooms as a Reflection of the Kitchen
Nearly three out of four people (73%) remember restaurants where they had a bad restroom experience – and avoid them in the future. “Whether it’s for a quick bite or fine dining, restrooms serve an essential function,” said Dotti Haynes, Marketing Director for the hospitality sector at Essity, when presenting the results of an international survey conducted last April by Tork (Essity’s professional hygiene brand) among 900 business clients and 6,000 end users.
“Restrooms are often seen as a behind-the-scenes reflection –just like the kitchen– where hygiene is critical for food safety. Businesses should not underestimate the image projected by poorly maintained or inadequately equipped toilets. They matter much more than people think,” she emphasized.
The survey also highlighted a gap between restaurant owners’ good intentions and what customers actually experience: 93% of business owners claim to want to meet the needs of as many people as possible, but fewer than half provide key amenities like accessible sinks and dispensers.
A Double-Edged Tool?
“We also give restaurant owners the opportunity to highlight everything they do well—including things that aren’t immediately visible,” stress the platform’s founders. In Belgium, one in three customers selects a restaurant based on online reviews. When properly managed, online reputation can build relationships, showcase team efforts, and foster customer loyalty. Consumers are increasingly looking for authenticity in interactions, paying close attention to how restaurateurs respond to feedback.
However, online identity remains fragile: malicious campaigns, fake negative reviews aimed at harm, or artificially inflated positive ones can skew the game and undermine establishments. And dissatisfied customers are usually the most vocal.
On wow-resto.com, private users must register and agree to the terms and conditions, committing to provide accurate and truthful information. Nonetheless, they remain solely responsible for the content they submit. The guide does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of submitted data.
A Belgian Platform Designed for Restaurateurs
As for professional users, they can choose from three subscription plans, ranging from €12 to €36 per month, each unlocking different features. The "smart choice," according to Wow-resto, is the most complete – and the most expensive. Compared to the basic package, it allows businesses to add payment options, manage opening hours, display multilingual menus, appear first in search results, and access dashboard analytics.
But the question remains: is rating a restaurant based on its restrooms a game-changing criterion – or just a quirky gimmick? Does this unique value proposition address an unmet need? What happens to giants like TheFork, Zenchef, Yelp, OpenTable, Google Local, and others? Or is this simply a promise of authenticity to stand out from platforms drowning in a sea of industrial-scale reviews?
Either way, the team says it’s committed to “redefining culinary recommendations” with a core mission to “highlight establishments that genuinely care about their customers.” For now, the young platform mainly covers the Belgian market but already has bigger ambitions, both geographically and commercially.
The founders hope to “grow the community, enrich the platform with more features (reservations, favorites, geolocation...), and continue providing more useful information without compromise.” Wow, quite a mission...
