:::: Time Out Delhi - city guide and fortnightly listing magazine ::::

At least twice a day, people call our office to enquire about the addresses or phone numbers of restaurants (justdial.com, people!). Sometimes, their queries are vaguer: “What’s a good Chinese restaurant where I can smoke? No, Friends Colony’s too far – anything within the Ring Road?” We’re happy to help, though most curious callers end up back at Pandara Road or 4S or Big Chill, regardless of what we say. Now, though, a host of online options will hopefully be changing all that. The growth of food-related websites should be a catalysing current through our eating-out (and eating-in) scene.

Until now, the food section of our little corner of Cyberia has been limited to a collection of cooking blogs and a smaller set of self-anointed food reviewers. Foremost – and certainly best-maintained – of all of these is Eating Out in Delhi (EoiD.org), “in celebration of offbeat Delhi food”. The site’s roots are in an Orkut group founded by moderator and economics lecturer Hemanshu Kumar, and the e-community recently graduated from a Wordpress blogsite to its own domain. Moderators plan outings and post reviews. The site has a fondness for street food and local legends, particularly chhola-kulchawalas.

ies.blogspot.com). Pamela Timms, an EoiD contributor who is interested in Anglo-Indian cuisine, occasionally posts street-food experiences in addition to her usual recipe offerings (eatanddust.wordpress.com). The “Soldier of Fortune” (Samil Malhotra, samilm.blogspot.com) has some interesting insights into the Parliament House canteen and Wenger’s – but his blog is freewheeling, travelling from Sukhamvit to Sabarmati. Similarly, Crowded Planet takes us from New Delhi to San Francisco, London and Hong Kong (crowdedplanet.wordpress.com). There are countless others – many of which focus on illustrated cooking (check out madteaparty.wordpress.com for a Delhi cook’s visual feast).

A recent variation on these is the entrepreneur-blog. For example, Kishi Arora (executive chef of Mad Over Donuts) has her own confection-delivery service site, but supplements this with a blog on her latest kitchen capers (foodaholics.in). Individual- or small-group-driven reviewing sites, however, are limited by the number of members. Hence the popularity of user-content-driven sites like burrp.com and mouthshut.com. Since reviewers are anonymous and unaccountable, though, much of their information is throwaway, or outdated. Slightly slicker versions, with more invested groupies include Facebook’s India dining guide.

As always, corporates have gotten into the online action. With the ability to offer comprehensive listings, deals and discounts, informative sites have the potential to drive restaurant popularity. Though at this point, many sites are in beta mode and are a bit shoddily constructed, there are a few promising players. Planforme.com offers information about hundreds of Delhi restaurants, bars and rentable venues (farmhouses, etc). There are feature sections, but the meat of the site is its discounts on food and drink. “We have about 700 restaurants so far,” CEO Sumit Goyal explained, elaborating that listed restaurants sign a contract and every venue offers a discount if you book a table through the site. Planforme also offers home delivery services – of more than just food (flowers, gifts, etc). “It’s a concierge desk,” Goyal said, “and we also allow user reviews”. Goyal told us that part of his mission is to rope in restaurants that aren’t pulling in many diners, using the website as shot-in-the-arm publicity. Planforme’s call centre (4310-4310) provides on-the-go information too. So do several other sites.

Indiafoodguide.com, which launched a beta site last year and should have launched version two by the time you read this, is owned by an IT development company in Laxmi Nagar that owns about 12 sites already (from a site selling expired domain names to vcricket.com). CEO Rajjesh Mittal told us that “food is recession-proof” – and the site certainly espouses the philosophy that more is more. Using data from the Federation of Hotel & Restaurant Associations of India, the site claims to have over 5,000 venues in Delhi listed. What’s more, their team has already shot a large number of Youtube videos capturing restaurant interiors and manager soundbites. The site will have maps, menus and coupons, and also plans to “auction parties”, where venues bid for potential customers. A mobile application provides location-specific information. The India Food Guide is not a review site, however.

In an interesting tie-up between an entrepreneur and a corporate, Siddharth Khullar, author of Chef at Large (food.sidkhullar.com), is a “strategic partner” with IIT alumni-start up Foodiebay.com. The Foodiebay site provides restaurant location information, menus and is slowly building up ratings, but works on a largely voluntary basis. Khullar writes reviews, provides recipes, “food porn” and other strategic content that give the main site more zest. Other sites include bitequest.com (which offers discounts), khaaopiyo.com and delhimenupages.com. Armchair food-lovers are obviously spoilt for choice these days, though concrete listings and dependable reviews are still pretty thin on the ground. But there’s an opportunity there, as well. Budding food critics or software engineers can get in on the online action now – several sites are hiring.