Finding the best places to eat is not easy. I have tried many restaurants. Sometimes I enter a restaurant intrigued by its name only to find out that the menu has nothing special. And once you get in, it’s not like you can just get a glass of water and come out. You must eat something. Finding a best place to eat is not easy – but Zomato makes it easy.

“Zomato.com : Discover more places to eat in your city” is a lifestyle web-portal which according to its tagline helps users to find different locations to eat/dine in their area of choice. Zomato (Previously known as Foodiebay) was started by Deepinder Goyal, a graduate from IIT Delhi. The Zomato portal is basically divided into three sections

  1. Restaurant Guide
  2. Events
  3. Crunch.

Restaurant Guide provides information not only about location of restaurants in your area but the Menu-card also. Yes! We can check-out the menu of restaurant from the comfort of our home. It’s so easy to compare menus and select the best restaurant according to your mood and budget, Zomato is really a time-saver.  Finding restaurants is easy.

Zomato’s restaurant guide currently serves Ten major cities in India – Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Kolkata, Bangalore, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmadabad ,Jaipur & Chandigarh.

Finding a restaurant is very easy. Just select your city from top bar, select your mood (you wanna get food delivered to your place or you wanna dine-out?), select your location and type of cuisine (From Afghani to Vietnamese). Click Explore.

zomato search box

Search Zomato

The number of restaurants in Zomato’s database is overwhelming. I searched for restaurants in Malviya Nagar area of Jaipur (which I often visit) and it returned a whopping 97 results for that area (I didn’t even know there were THAT many places to eat there).

Zomato Search Result

Malviya Nagar- Zomato search result

Moreover there were some budget as well as some premium restaurants, so no matter what your pocket size is, you are going to find a restaurant which suits you.

As a user you can read and write reviews of restaurants and rate them on a scale of 5 stars.

Zomato recently launched events section on the portal which currently serves only four cities – Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore for now. It lists various lifestyle events (Arts, Concerts, Fashion etc) happening in your city.

Crunch section is like a Life-style eMagazine, showcasing cool cooking recipes, featured restaurants, reviews and news from Zomato.

Zomato also has dedicated iPhone/ Android / Blackberry apps for those who are always on the go! These apps are simple, elegant and fast – just the way an app should be.

3 things I really like about Zomato :

1.) Ease of use : My friend’s 13 year old brother to my 80 year young grandfather, everyone can search and view menus of their favorite restaurants using Zomato. It’s THAT easy.

2.) Searching Options: Not only I can search restaurants / dining places by their search location, but also the cuisines and dishes they serve. No longer I have to hunt for a restaurant which serves Matar Pulaav because that’s the only thing I wanna have for dinner. I can just look up the info on Zomato.

3.) More than a menu-card database: The newly launched Events section takes Zomato closer to being a complete life-style portal. It keeps track of hip events happening in my city for me. Arts and Dance, Food and Drinks, Music, theater, there is something for everyone.

3 things Zomato could improve upon:

1.) More cities : I stay in Jaipur (thankfully Zomato has Restaurant Guide for Jaipur) for studies. I would love to be able to see Menus of Restaurants from other smaller cities like Indore, Nagpur, Chandigarh etc. I know as Zomato is growing, this may take some time, I just hope that Zomato team realizes that Market potential of smaller cities.

2.) User Contribution : Giving the users ability to upload menus and add events can help tremendously in Zomato’s growth. This may prove challenging at first as verifying thousands of menus each day is not easy, but appointing trusted users as moderators can help in that way. It’s just my opinion but I believe Zomato management is already working on site’s upgrade and expansion, so let’s just wait and see.

3.) Event Reminders : This is more like an idea we should really implement. It would be great if a user has the option of subscribing to events of a particular city by SMSs and Emails. So any new event notification will directly get delivered to user. We can also integrate event calendar with Google calendar or other such calender applications.

I believe Zomato has just started and it will go a long way and become a complete lifestyle portal.

It’s one of those web-services which make life a little simpler, don’t you think?