Zomato.com Launches Printed Restaurant Guides; Chooses Flipkart For Exclusive Pre-booking

Gurgaon-based DC Foodiebay Online Services Pvt Ltd, which owns the popular restaurant site Zomato, has forayed into the print medium with paperback restaurant guides for four cities – Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune. The company has tied up with Citibank for this project (with a co-branded, and we would guess sponsored, Citibank Zomato Restaurant Guide 2012) and will have special offers for the bank's customers.

Interestingly, these listings are already available on Flipkart.com on pre-booking basis and those opting for the guides will be entitled to 25 per cent discount. Zomato and Flipkart are confident of selling 100,000 copies during the pre-booking month. However, these will be available in the market from the second week of May.

The Zomato guides feature options for every occasion – be it a romantic dinner, a beer in a pub, the girls' night out or dining with kids. Each city guide covers around 200 restaurants, which are the "best" for specific occasions. They also provide QR codes for all restaurants listed, enabling users to check updated menus, contact information and other details via smartphones.

"It is not an encyclopaedia of restaurants but a carefully designed list of recommendations for a particular 'occasion.' Restaurants included in the guide are an unbiased choice of seasoned foodies (Zomato users) who appreciate good food and great experiences more than anything else," announced Deepinder Goyal, founder & CEO of Zomato.com, in an official blog post.

"Our customers have appreciated the dining programmes that we launched earlier this year and we are confident that they will enjoy the fine selection of restaurants and the Citibank dining privilege offers listed in this book." said Muge Yuzuak, MD & head of credit payment products, Citibank.

Zomato (formerly known as Foodiebay) was started in 2008 by IIT-Delhi alumni Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah. Both of them worked with the consulting giant Bain & Company before starting the venture. Zomato is an online food directory which provides extensive information to help users choose where to dine out or dine in. It is backed by public-listed Internet firm Info Edge (India) Ltd, the company behind the popular job site Naukri.com, and received two rounds of funding, totalling around $4 million.