Blog: Grubia.com

Who doesnt like a juicy burger?!

2009-10-16T12:32:00.005-04:00

Who seriously doesn't like a juicy burger now and again? I know I do!!!! But I must say the manliest of burgers that I have attempted to consume was from Jackson Hole. These burgers are deliciously monstrous, juice and ketchup dripping down your chin good. Their like 1/2 pound each!!! I'm a total fan of most of their burger creations, but if you're wondering what people have to say about the individual choices take a peek at Grubia.com, select city and type in burger. No restaurant guess work necessary! The hard facts of what burger might tease your palate in just the right way is on Grubia! Happy burger chomping!

Grubia leaps ahead...

2009-07-09T12:21:00.006-04:00

In the latest move on our ever expanding coverage of all that is grub and needs to be found, Grubia.com is adding 3 more cities this weekend – San Francisco, Chicago and Dallas. Tech team spent a lot of time to make sure that the experience that was created for the city of New York is not only replicated but also enhanced with this new release. Do you know that we now cover 250,000 number of dishes (grubs) served at 12,000 restaurants. The inside story is that the Grubia team is still hungry for more. We intend to cover at least 10 cities by the time the year ends.

All this would just be numbers unless we hear from you. Do you have any suggestions on improving Grubia’s user experience? Any specific functionality or feature that you would want us to add? Which city would you like us to cover next? So please feel free to share with us your thoughts and ideas. You can always leave a comment on this post or reach us at contact@grubia.com.

Secret is out now!!! We will be creating online buzz to help more and more people discover the simple yet incredible “What to eat? Where to eat?” experience. So what are you waiting for? Folks spread the word and start grubbing…

Menu Language

2009-02-15T02:03:00.000-05:00

I have made several trips to “Mai’s” – a Vietnamese restaurant. Other than country diners its one of the very few restaurants open till 4 am in my neck of the woods. The trips have been with various groups of friends and under varying levels of influence of liquids altering the state of mind.

I have often recommended the garlic chicken to a willing ear. “Chicken sautéed with garlic and onion” is a very bland, to put it mildly, description of the dish on the menu. Last week I was intrigued to see a new dish on the menu. It was the “Special garlic chicken”. The description said “Garlic chicken with vegetables in a special sauce”. It was priced 30% higher than the Garlic Chicken. The server said to try it as it’s “better” than the Garlic Chicken and there is a reason it costs more. What I ended up ordering is irrelevant.

The incident made me think about the importance of dish descriptions on a menu. How can a restaurant use it to its advantage to promote a particular dish. Most of the restaurants use the classic trick to add complexity to names of dishes to increase the price. “Hand rolled dough, stone baked and topped with a medley of berries” will command a higher price than “Bread and Jam”. There are many schools of thought on the “Menu Language”. I will leave that to the owner to decide the best dialect.

I am not aware of studies done on the impact of phrases like “Customers’ Favorite” & “Chef’s Favorite”. I strongly believe restaurants can use it to sell their best dishes. The menu can have a section where a card with a new dish name can be inserted. This could be anything from “Customer’s favorite”, “Top seller of the month” or even something more dynamic like, “This really smells good today”.

I would certainly be tempted to try dishes with such descriptions. It will be interesting to study such impact on dish sales. What do you think? I will leave you at that thought. Its 2 am and the garlic chicken beckons … BURP!!!

The concept of Grubia in the real world

2009-01-23T00:04:00.015-05:00

Last night over dinner with friends we ordered Manchurian for the appetizer. One of us commented that the Manchurian at “Mayuri” is the best they have had. The others didn’t share the same enthusiasm about the food there. That was unusual because majority of the times we share the same taste.

Mayuri has an extensive menu that serves food from various parts of the country. In all probability one would be better than the other? How can a customer enjoy the best that the restaurant has to offer? I read this article in the NYT . The article brings up another issue that the restaurants and customers have to face. Here is a piece of the article:

“New York Business, however, praised that same steak dish as “a standout,” but disparaged the lamb shank as “too timid in the flavor department.””

What does this mean for the restaurant? The Lamb Shank wouldn’t be selling too well. Even if the restaurant changes the dish and makes it “better” based on the review what can it do to change the perception? Only way to do it is to have customers taste it and talk about it or in other words refer it to others. A strong referral is traditionally as an effective tool seen in a consumer or a retail setting. It would be invaluable here. There are numerous studies done and articles published that emphasize the importance of referral on business. A personal favorite being the Net Promoter.

Grubia is a step in that direction. We are working on a model to rank dishes not by just simple ratings. Soon we will add the Grrrrrrrr in promoter.

Exciting to see users ask Grubia what to eat

2009-01-09T02:09:00.003-05:00

Its an exciting feeling to see some one use your product. Specially so in the very early start-up phase when every single user gets the adrenalin pumping.

Just happened to be at a friends place who had been following the site and now uses it to check out what to eat in the restaurant she is about to visit.

This day she was going to eat at the TiffinWallah , a nice indian restaurant. And she checked out some south indian grub reviews on grubia.

This year we hope to make such searches routine and on a massive scale.

Lets go grubbin, folks!!

Welcoming a Happy Year of Grubbing in 09

2009-01-09T01:59:00.003-05:00

Wishing all our users a Happy New Year. A year in which we hope to make grubia.com a trusted resource for you to find the best grubs to eat in a restaurant or to find where to eat your favorite grub.

We have been working behind the scenes, despite the bad economy and many other hurdles to make grubia ready for prime time. Its been a while since i updated the blog and not because we have been napping, but because we have been iterating to make things better and better. And we will be releasing them shortly.

We thank you all for encouraging us, using grubia and giving feedback. We have been seeing a steady increase in traffic since officially putting the alpha version out in late november. And we hope to make that growth increase month to month

We are finally UP! Live but still pre-alpha

2008-08-24T14:59:00.005-04:00

Grubia.com has finally gone live! After mths of thinking, brainstorming, proto-typing and making demo pitches for the tc50 competition, we have got the site up. There were many glitches on the way; issues with setting up the software on the host, problems with getting to make capistrano work (for migrating ruby code from test to prod dir) and the personal challenge that RC has been facing of moving to a new place in queens (RC, has decided to move out of manhattan as as to have a bigger place for this rapidly growing daughter).

Currently just basic pages are done - you can create a profile, upload pics, see some grub pages and comment on them. Here is a screenshot of the home page.

RC is working hard along with Ajit to pump in all the grub data into the database (yes folks, we have more than 10,000 dishes served in over 4,000 places in New York. So you can just about find anything to grub on!) and then use our GrubIndexer to create the index within the sphinx search engine.

So stay tuned - in a week we will have all these cool features worked out so that the next time you visit a restaurant and wonder what to order there, check up on grubia. And then if you like what you ate, come review the grub here

Bon appetite!

Search, Search and Better Search

2008-08-16T14:01:00.004-04:00

Grubia is all about finding what to eat at a particular place or the best place to eat something you love. So basically, What to eat?Where to eat?

Given thousands of restaurants in New York City alone and the many thousand dishes, that our GruBot has crawled and our GrubIndxr has indexed, the question automatically is how to perform the most relevant search.

There are two aspects in providing great search results - Indexing and Ranking. Indexing, though not very complicated (we are using the powerful sphinx search engine) is tricky, because one has to index information at several levels. For instance, if Chicken Teriyaki is served at many restaurants, not only do we have to index the information at the lexical dish name level (words like chicken and teriyaki), but we also want to index the same information at higher semantic levels such as entree and japanese cuisine. So GrubIndexer has to maintain several indices.
Now the question of classifying what is a japanese dish is in itself an exercise and our GrubClassifier does that by learning over a set of test data.

Then comes ranking. The question is if Chicken Teriyaki is served at 100s of restaurants, we want to be able to rank the results to give the user the name of only the best places where one should eat that. Now what is best - we are looking at user ratings, user views, user comments and a bunch of other parameters to rank the different places where "Chicken Teriyaki" is served.
The next level is complexity is embedding a location filter so that one can narrow the result by places close to a zip code.

We are tweaking the algos and looking into sphinx to see how we can perform the best search at optimal response times.

Because the next time you have the craving for the best "Chicken Tikka Masala" we can "serve" you the names of the top 10 places where people have really enjoyed that.

OR that next time you are a restaurant, we can pull up the top 3 appetizers, entrees , desserts and drinks ordered at that place.

All so that your next meal is just awesome !

Not to the Final, but we got invited for the Demopit

2008-08-16T13:54:00.003-04:00

Ok, so we heard back from tc50. They sent us the "sorry email". We havent qualified for the final rounds, but they liked out idea enough to offer us to take a spot in the demopit of the tc50 conference.

Not disheartening at all. Infact, we are just a bit too early to be invited to the final rounds as our development is still much in progress. The grubia search needs to work, the iphone app needs to come through and if we had qualified, we wudnt have really been ready by sept 8th as RC has been busy trying to find a new place to move into (his daughter is growing up fast and he needs a larger apartment :-)

So, grubia chugs along. After the love for grub powers us!

I think we nailed the idea in the demo

2008-08-01T20:28:00.001-04:00

The tc50 demo is done. I think we nailed the communication of the central idea, at-least. The techcrunch reviewer (S), got it. She spontaneously asked , "is this mobile also? can i get the grub recommendations on a cell phone when i am in a restaurant?" "Yes, you can", we countered, "but we are still developing it".

I think we did a good job. RC was smoother and more articulate. S even asked if we have some funding at the moment (is that supposed to be good or bad). I had a hunch that since it would be 5.15 pm in the valley when our demo would go live, the reviewer may get hungry seeing pictures of food. Bingo! S said we got her hungry and now she would have to go and look up an indian restaurant and figure out what to eat there. Well , S give us a month and grubia.com would answer that question for you.

Go grubia! Always know "what to eat and where to eat!" And if you eat something awesome, burp it out soon at the upcoming grubia.com

Dialled in and ready to go.

2008-08-01T20:00:00.000-04:00

We are all set. counting the seconds. its 8 pm - they should login and call in anytime! Even the fans has been switched off in my room. Water, Water, Water. Need some water.

Update:

Its 8.05pm. Still no one has joined the meeting. Common tech crunch guys, where are you folks?
We have finished up our red bull too.

Its 8.08pm. Some activity. Sarah joins in. I think we are going live now.

i need to go to the rest room

2008-08-01T19:51:00.000-04:00

i need to take a rest room break. this is getting too exciting. and i am nervous! will be back

The d-day. we demo to tc50 today

2008-08-01T19:49:00.001-04:00

in 9 mins we will be demoing to tc50 reviewers. we have been on red bull and coffee for last 24 hrs. palpable excitment. rohit has been practicing for an hour. checking to see webex is working. that the localhost demo is ready and that the slides are done!

this should roll. common grubbers, wish us luck.

dry run of grubia on july 31st

2008-08-01T19:46:00.000-04:00

we have done our first dry run. the response is positive - people think this is a need. they like the cool look and feel. but the presentation needs more work and polish. phew it was a burner. scorching - to do all this in live over webex (which didnt start on time)

tc50 demo scheduled for august 1, 8 pm est

2008-08-01T19:45:00.000-04:00

we have a time and date. with tc50 reviewers for our demo of grubia. cant be more excited and nervous. we still have a lot of things to work on but we are moving along in our alpha development plans.

time to get the slides done and also the demo

We have submitted to techcrunch 50

2008-08-01T19:43:00.000-04:00

Yup! In june, we decided to submit grubia for the techcrunch 50 contest. That is a big thing to look upto. We could be in san fran launching grubia in september. we are excited. after months of thinking and some weeks developing, we are looking forward to a hard fixed date for getting grubia out. we are still brewing but i am sure we will get there when tc50 calls to see our demo.

Grubia is coming along

2008-08-01T19:41:00.000-04:00

After weeks of discussions and thinking, we have been making progress in translating our idea to a product. We have a cool looking alpha site coming up.

Eureka! The idea of grubia takes shape

2008-06-01T19:38:00.000-04:00

I had been mulling a new startup since december 2007, as i continued working on my first real startup, ifood.tv. iFood.tv had begun to take shape and was on its own feet (see traffic growth) so i started to get the itch to start something new (that itch happens all the time and my ideas come a galore).

I decided to start something in the food space with a friend RC (the founder of grubia) who had put in great work on ifood too.

We wanted to create something that was a real need, that was innovative and cool. RC was itching to make something from scratch and make it "wow". There are tons of recipe, restaurant review and menu listing sites. So we thought about a bunch of things. I was particuarly interested in creating something that would allow a person to express the feverish excitement of having eaten something great.

We fleshed it out more (coming up with really cool ideas, that we will develop going forward) Our focus was , grub. I eat out very frequently in the city and have on numerous occasions got "everything is great here" responses from the waiter on asking them to make a recommendation. How useful is that? I think others have had the same experience. As a foodie, none of the curent restaurant review sites let me find information at a grub level

So it got me and RC thinking that there really is no simple, reliable way to "know what to eat " in a restaurant. From there on, one idea thread led to another and lo and behold we were talking about grubia.com. Read the full details of the idea at my post on ideakhan.com