Urge to gorge

This blog came about after I decided I needed a mission for 2010 and put out a post and a poll on my primary blog, Days of Alps. Turns out, people want me to eat my way through 2010 and I will be more than happy to oblige!

So this is my plan:

1. Make a static list of all restaurants in Andheri east and west listed on burrp.com. The reason I need a static list is because I will never be able to keep up with a growing list! And considering the pace at which restaurants come up in Mumbai, I'll take more than 5 years to finish this!
2. Try and finish at least one restaurant a week until I finish all of Andheri (this will, of course, take more than a year if you do the math, but I can't possibly aim for higher, so be it!)
3. Write a review of each restaurant, with ratings for the following:

• Food (of course)
• Menu variety
  
• Service
• Ambience
• Price
• Location

Each restaurant will be a story really, not just a review. And I hope my friends and others will be able to relate to these stories and gain from my experience!

Oh by the way, I've been wanting to talk about why I chose burrp in the first place. Long time back, I had a suggestion to make and the way burrp handled customer feedback was phenomenal! Here's how it went.

I wanted a feature to be enabled on burrp and conveyed this to them using their feedback link on the top of every of their pages. This is what I wrote:

Let us add tags to a restaurant. Sometimes, the tags are not comprehensive. E.g. the restaurant Oriental Octopus in Noida Sector 16 also serves indonesian food, which is not mentioned in the tags. I wanted to add it, but couldn't.

To which, I got a prompt reply within 24 hours, from a lady called Aarti. And here's how it went:

Hi Alpana,

Thank you very much for writing to us and bringing up a very useful tool that is missing from our model presently. The reason why the ability to add tags or additional information is closely controlled on burrp! is because we fear that while opening this platform to everyone will add considerable breadth from users like yourself, we will also get an even greater number of spam from troublemakers. This will affect the overall quality of information on the site and hamper usability through search. I agree that due to this restriction we are missing out on a lot of additional information that users can provide. And thus we will soon be launching an enhanced version of burrp! that will enable certain trusted users to make edits to the business. Users will also be able to pick certain attributes of the business from a set of attributes while writing a review. So imagine you were writing a review and on the left handle side you saw a bunch of options that ask you to choose the best tags that describe the place. Something of this sort is coming soon.

Your feedback is noted and is much appreciated. Please do write to us whenever you see anything amiss on the site. We thrive on user feedback; it gives us an opportunity to get better.

Thanks again,


Best regards,
Aarti (last name deleted)
(designation deleted)
burrp!

This is really the kind of response you want to get when you give feedback. She not only acknowledged the fact that it was a missing feature, but also gave me a logical explanation why and how it would be corrected in the future. This was way back in August 2009 and it gave me a newfound respect for burrp.

So anyway, back to the mission, this site will be up and running as soon as I figure out a way of getting the static list generated. I'll see you soon!