DON’T FORGET TO FLASH

The toilet is the hottest seat in the house, as publicity-hungry restaurateurs design over-the-top bathrooms perfect for Instagram

T EN years ago, if you had snapped a photo of yourself in a public restroom and tried to share it with your friends, you could count on a few dubious looks. Now, you get likes — lots of them.

It’s the age of the Instagram bathroom. Savvy restaurateurs are catering to millennials by pouring money into powder rooms that are so pictureperfect, customers can’t help but snap a selfie and post it on social media. A search of the hashtag #bathroomselfie on Instagram turns up over 1.3 million images.

“The restaurant business today has to be an experience for the younger people that are [living] on the Internet through their phone,” says Willie “Jack” Degel, a restaurant owner and the former host of Food Network’s “Restaurant Stakeout.” When he opened Uncle Jack’s Meat House in Astoria in December, making the restaurant Instagrammable was a priority.

For the bathroom, which is unisex, that meant installing a 55-inch “selfie mirror” in front of the sinks. The mirror also functions as a touch screen. Tap it and a cartoon animation of owner Degel appears, goading you to pose for a photo. You can choose one to three frames on your photo strip, and the snaps are sent to your e-mail and printed in a slot (for free!) next to the sink.

“Everybody’s wowed, everybody’s copying it, everybody’s

blown away,” says Degel. “The restaurant business is show business.”

Hospitality-industry designers say they’re seeing clients put more resources into powder rooms, with an eye toward making customers snap happy.

“Years ago, [the bathroom] just wasn’t where you put your money in a restaurant,” says John Kole, co-founder at Brooklyn design firm Hecho Inc. “Now it’s a little more expected that your budget would be appropriate to design heavily in the bathroom.”

Samantha Wasser, co-founder of fast-casual restaurants the Sosta and By Chloe, says good design equals free publicity.

“Social media is a free tool that I try and play to as much as possible,” says Wasser, whose newest venture, Dez, in Nolita, is drawing likes for its bathroom. “When you’re opening a restaurant, you have such a small budget.”

Some say they didn’t set out to design trendy toilets, but they’re happy for the attention.

“Bathrooms have always been ... the one place where you’re alone and you can take in your surroundings, so it was impor- tant to me that the bathroom be interesting,” says Natalka Burian, part owner of Elsa in Cobble Hill, which opened in early 2017. The cocktail bar’s two restrooms have backlit, slatted mirrors that give a futuristic fun-house effect that Instagrammers love.

“I did not anticipate it,” she says. But, “if people feel so comfortable in the bathroom that they’re taking photos in there . . . that’s a hospitality win.”

At Motel Morris, which opened in April 2017, the rosy bathrooms — featuring vintage floral wallpaper, pink lawn chairs and a rotary phone — spawned its own hashtag: #peeinpink.

Part-owner Tamara McCarthy says it happened organically, but they ran with it.

“The hashtag was added when we realized people were taking a long time in the bathroom, taking pictures,” she says.

Bottom line? Having an establishment without a photogenic bathroom is potentially flushing money down the toilet.

Designer Kole believes the once-modest commode can make or break an entire restaurant concept.

He says: “They’re either forgettable or extraordinary.”

The vibrant restroom at Nolita Mediterranean eatery Dez — short for desert — is very “LA meets Morocco,” says Samantha Wasser (pictured sitting with fellow co-founder Eden Grinshpan). The bright, metallic wallpaper was custom designed by Paperwhite Studio and coordinates with some of the fast-casual restaurant’s packaging.

@kyliejenner Celebs aren’t above a bathroom selfie. Kylie Jenner (far left) posed with her famous friends in the restroom at the Met Ball in May 2017.

The lovely ladies’ room at the late Four Seasons was legendary, but it didn’t exactly attract an Instagram crowd. But now that The Grill, a buzzy steakhouse, has opened in the tony Seagram Building, the swank lounge is getting its close-up on social media. “It certainly lends itself to impromptu photoshoots,” says Chloe Roessell (third from left), 27, a creative director based in Los Angeles.

Stephanie Peterson, 29, and her date, Jonathan Butts (far right), 28, both Astoria-based photographers, didn’t plan on commemorating their date with a photo last February, but they couldn’t resist the “selfie mirror” at Uncle Jack’s Meat House. She says: “[It] was a fun addition to our Valentine’s Day celebration!”The 55-inch mirror is a touch screen with a camera atop it. The steakhouse’s CEO, Willie Degel, says his competitors are in awe of it. “Everyone I know in the restaurant industry said, ‘Jesus Christ, Willie, what did you do to us? Now we gotta keep up with this?’ ”

At trendy Latin-inspired Lower East Side eatery Lalito, an unassuming dining room leads to a veritable tropical club of a bathroom, where disco lights are aglow and J.Lo’s “Waiting for Tonight” plays on a loop.“[It’s] a simple way to both make people happy and to pay homage to a cultural hero,” says Lalito co-owner and executive chef Gerardo Gonzalez.