Crowded restaurants ruining date night? These startups want to make dining sexy in India

Photo credit: Pixabay.

Indian cuisine has an excellent reputation. Though Indians have traditionally preferred to cook and eat at home, dining out at restaurants has become a lot more popular in the past couple of years, particularly in households with working couples and long working hours.

The USDA’s 2014 study of India’s food service industry estimates that there are over 100,000 restaurants (seat 20 or more people with a wait staff and menus) in the country. Even when you consider that India’s middle class eats out twice a month, that’s not a lot, considering that India’s population is 1.2 billion.

This means that twice a month, especially if you live in an urban area, you might find yourself relying on luck of the draw when it comes to picking a restaurant with little to no waiting time. And, as a lot of us know from experience, waiting is one of the least attractive things when your stomach is growling. Startups like Eazydiner and Loofre are taking that opportunity to make wait times shorter – and hopefully get more Indians dining out.

“People line up for restaurants, especially in Delhi,” says Deepak Shahdadpuri, who, in addition to running Singapore based VC firm DSG Partners Asia, co-founded restaurant reservations startup Eazydiner early last year. “The problem is that restaurants don’t know how many customers they will have.”

He explains that booking a reservation always involves a call to the restaurant, but that was too slow for him – he wanted instant real-time bookings. Eazydiner helps customers figure out what restaurant is free for what night so that people can dine out more frequently and without having to worry about crowds. “Today, you can book a cab in 30 seconds and get a cab,” he reasons. “Why can’t you do the same with reservations?”

Using Eazydiner, customers can browse restaurants in Delhi, Bangalore, Pune, and Mumbai with digitized menus and insider tips on a blog-type feature called EazyTrends. Foodies can book specific tables for specified dates and times, and search for specific discounts and price ranges.

See: How Eazydiner is carving out a niche for itself that Zomato can’t enter

A hotel model for restaurants

Photo credit: Scott Dexter.

Deepak and his team approached the reservation scene with hotels in mind. “All of us came from a hotel’s background,” Eazydiner senior vice president Rohit Dasgupta says, which is why Eazydiner features two types of restaurants. Standalone enterprises make up 70 percent of the startup’s business, while hotel eateries make up the other 30 percent. Restaurants pay a fee to the app depending on which class they fall into.

Hotels have more structure than restaurants do, but Rohit thought their models were similar enough to work. Hotels have to work through occupancy limits for room bookings, just like restaurants do.

The success of food delivery businesses like Zomato further encouraged him.

“Dining will make more money than delivery,” he explains. He thinks there’s more room for loyalty when people dine out and that 40 percent of Eazydiner’s 100,000+ customers are return users.

Fancy a night out?