Zomato! - The Restaurant Guide.

Zomato! - The Restaurant Guide.

by Hb ~ Friday, September 30, 2011

Zomato is a super cool website for desi foodies across many cities. Honestly, I don't remember how I came across Zomato but it's now made it to my favorite list of websites. Folks at Zomato have asked for feedback. Here goes my two pence - .

Best 3 things about Zomato –

1. The extensive food menu feature that they have here.I really like the menu tab Zomato offers for the restaurants featured, which other websites don't seem to possess. Apart from giving you a fair understanding of how 'multi-cuisine' or 'continental' a restaurant is, it gives you a peek into how much you have to shell out to eat there.

2. Reviews, reviews and REVIEWS! As clichéd as it might sound, this is what makes Zomato the best food related website. It feels incredibly nice to know that a bunch of people would take your advice to ditch or visit a place. Add to it some nice pictures of the food and the place and I'm sure you'd spend hours on this website. This is a right time to say how efficient the guys at Zomato are. They go out of their way to help you with tiniest of information/silliest of queries. Atleast 10 people I know were introduced to Zomato because of these small gestures which take Zomato a long way.

3. The Zomato app for mobiles(Android, iphone & Blackberry) is the coolest app ever to find places to eat on the go. It’s completely user friendly and doesn't have any clutter and encompasses all the amazing Zomato features(food menus, read/write reviews etc) apart from the location based services that helps us to find the restaurants around a locality or around your current gps position.

So, what fun it is to be without imperfections. Here goes my 3 suggestions -

1. Have a "hot Zomato-ites/Zomato-eans this week/today" column - Technically this is where people who have contributed a lot to Zomato feature. You can include what they recommend in the city, their best review etc., here. This will help Zomato reach out to people and prod them to contribute in a better way. Also, it makes them feel special. Believe me, when I say one featured review and one winning review made me feel like I belong to Zomato troop ;)

2. Recommendations for dishes - On the lines of Serious eats' best places to eat Sandwich in NYC or Best hot dog in CA(you should totally Google Serious eats if you haven't come across it until now), I think Zomato should come with Must-try-Kebab-Place or Hottest dosa stop in town etc., on may be weekly basis. It ensues in lot of debates and foodie fights which only give out more information. In fact, we might discover gems of places which might be tucked away in some corner and unknown to newbies.

If you have a star/medallion icon or something similar suggesting there's a must try dish at that restaurant it will help while exploring (via mobile/desktop) the restaurants around.

3. Let the restaurateurs speak - I'm sure many of us nurture this dream of opening a small cozy cafe or a fancy restaurant. It'd be great to hear from people who traveled this way so that we can learn a great deal from them. Also, please get the renowned chefs from our beloved restaurants to whip up their signature dish (es). (Newsletter Crunch doesn't do enough of this whenever it does. It is totally under-stated mostly because it puts all cities at one place). This can again be done three ways -
i. Ticker away whenever you put in a new item, so poor souls like us don't miss any updates.
ii. Make a way for us to subscribe to a particular city so that next time we log in we'll have all the updates.
iii. Have add-ons for various browsers. It could simply notify us of the food events, new reviews or a newly featured restaurant in Zomato.

Also, I'm not a fan of group buying especially in food business. So, I'm glad Zomato is not up to it anytime soon.
Zomato is a wonderful website (like I haven't said already :D) but what makes it even more awesome is its enthusiasm to get better. I wish Zomato all the very best. Please continue leading us to scrumptious, luscious, yummy and delicious food. :)