Zomato Restaurant Guide 2012 - A Book Review

Zomato.com, famous for its online restaurant reviews has published the first edition of its restaurant guide for 4 cities - Delhi, Mumbai, Pune & Bangalore.

Zomato.com, started in 2008 is a website that helps people discover places to eat - either near to their home or workplace or anywhere they were travelling to. It is the go-to electronic website in India catering to the needs of 3 million unique users across the web and mobile phones every month. This site is extremely user friendly and easy to use. So what happens when such a site decides to foray into the print medium? The 'Zomato Restaurant Guide' is born!

About the book -

First Impression - The book looks elegant and promising. The cover itself promises information and reviews of 200 must-visit restaurants in Mumbai. Besides, it claims to have categorized the restaurants on the basis of occasions or moods.

Diving in - A very helpful index, followed by a short intro and a note from the Editor. Then comes the most exciting part of the guide. The occasion based classification of restaurants. There's a list of restaurants for every category. And each restaurant is cross-referenced giving the reader seemingly unlimited options to explore. (you could flip over to the particular page to get details about any restaurant), the average cost and its location.

Feel like Oriental? No? How about dessert?

There are other categories like Girl's Night out or Nightlife & Clubbing and much more!

Moving on - The actual pulp of the book is its information & reviews for the restaurants. Every restaurant in the guide typically has its address, phone number, the type of cuisine, average cost, timings, user ratings, a general user review and a "Don't Miss!" feature that lists the dishes to be to tried at the place. Individual entries in the Zomato Restaurant Guide carry a QR code, giving smartphone users instant access to a restaurant’s menu on the Zomato site. That's some pretty awesome stuff, heh?! :)

 

Finally, you have an index of all the restaurants sorted alphabetically and marked with their respective page numbers.

Pros

• Excellent quality. 
• Shiny, well-designed pages
• Beautiful food and wine photography
• Properly categorized (there are 22 categories!)
• Perfect size. Just right to carry it around with you.
• Affordable. It is priced at just Rs.200 (Flipkart is currently offering it at Rs.149)

Cons

• No locality wise categorization. This was a serious let down for me because I would rather browse restaurants by locality than by alphabets.
• User reviews didn't exactly tell me much about the food at the restaurant. So that feature seems kinda useless.
• Some of the popular restaurants in Mumbai like Yoko Sizzler, Flags haven't even been mentioned.
• Due to scarcity of place in Mumbai, many people would want to know if the restaurant accommodates their vehicles (if yes, whether valet parking or not)

Although Citibank Zomato Restaurant Guide 2012 may not be a compilation of ALL the restuarants in Mumbai, it definitely does a commendable job in getting together most of the good restaurants. Will I pay 200 bucks for the guide? Absolutely.

Disclaimer: This is an unpaid review.

This review is a part of the Book Reviews Program at BlogAdda.com. Participate now to get free books!