An Observation

I’ve been keenly following this Zomato outrage and have made a rather pertinent observation. On the issue of the Ad itself, I can understand some of the anger that’s been festering deep within our chom hating hearts, and unfortunately Zomato happened to be at the receiving end of some overtly angry magas. Actually, the issue I have is with the way we have been gastronomically stereotyped.

“Oh, and if you ever think you’ll get homesick, we also have Monkey Bar, Krispy Kreme, a couple of Nando’s and a bunch of KFCs.”

Holy Fuck! This is an outrage! Is this what we have been reduced down to by probably the most popular restaurant review site in India! A bunch of Monkey Bar loving, donut dunking, peri-peri bathing, fried-chickeneistas? I always fashioned myself, and I think I speak for the majority of Looreans here, as a Idli slamming, benne-dosa belting, chicken-kebab kolting, DSP Black sending gentleman of sorts. This paradigm shift in Zomato’s, a Delhi based company, perception of what a Bangalorean eats is so far removed from reality that I think they were referring to some other city while preparing the initial draft for the ad and then changed the name of the city at the last minute.

But then, I thought, wait a minute. Zomato is arguably India’s largest consolidator of restaurant and eatery reviews, so maybe their stereotyping of our food habits is backed up by their own data, a repository of reviews of practically every food joint in the city. Wouldn’t it be fair to assume that someone at Zomato would have checked their own database to see what kind of food people would be homesick for based on the popularity of various eateries in Bangalore based on their own database.

I decided to check this out myself. For a moment, I was petrified.

I filtered a search for restaurants in Bangalore where typical meal for two is around INR 250, keeping in mind we are talking about food you’d want to eat every day and I think that’s a fair budget to look at. The results were a big relief. Vidyarthi Bhavan, Maiyya’s, CTR, Corner House, Brahmins, and even a couple of Militry Hotels among several other old Bangalore favourites feature way higher than any of the eateries mentioned by Zomato. Even when the budget is increased to INR 500 for two, the results are as expected, Mangalore Pearl, Suchi Ruchi, Royal Andhra and one Donne Biryani Place that I think I want to go to.

This is disappointing. Zomato has stereotyped my gastronomic preferences on the basis of a sample of people who definitely don’t represent a typical Bangalorean based ON THEIR OWN WEBSITE! Who the fuck have these guys been hanging out with in the Looru? Someone should take these guys out to the real places for some idli-dosai-vada-sambar-pecosflatbeer and position the stereotype quickly before things really get out of hand.

Paavum fellows. 

Or did they really know this already and we were trolled to perfection. Whoa....mind blasting!