Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep… when I was a kid, every morning I would hear this beeps of the alarm clock, it was so annoying me. I used to say – Mom, gimme five more minutes! I don’t wanna go to school today! It’s so early! “Gimme 5″. Later I formed a group of five friends called “Gimme 5 Gang”.

Recently, one of my friends from the “Gimme 5 Gang” updated his status on facebook – Zomato.com and ME. I asked, what’s this? .. Is Zomato or your GF or something else? Then he posted his comment in reply of this question – it’s restaurant guide. You can search for the best local restaurants and places to eat. It’s the original restaurant guide offering thousands of restaurant listings in your local area. Find the best restaurants in your area.

Are you joining Zomato? He said – YES. WOW! it’s great to hear this. So it was obvious – TREAT TO BANTA HAI BUDDY! He has to join Zomato in Bangalore. But most friends of our gang are living in Delhi. We “Gimme 5 Gang” – decided a “hang out” day and spot – it was 5 Sept. He agreed to have a big party in GK2.

I posted a wall “Stay with Gimme 5 Gang, Stay with Fun!” on facebook and the same I posted in our circle on Google+ too and mentioned that – if anyone has any suggestions for good restaurants in GK2, please ping us or leave a message here.

Before 5 Aug he has to reach Delhi. We were five guys… everyone started wondering a good restaurant in GK or nearby this area. The friend who has to host the party is living in Bangalore. But the party would be organized in Delhi. We all five guys started searching for a good restaurant in GK, Delhi. You know why we chose GK as location for this party – because we used to be hangout here in our college days.

Phew! Foolish thing is – I forgot the name of organization which my friend will be joining shortly. It happens sometimes, when you hear a strange name for the first time. I started googling for “Restaurants in Delhi” .. I clicked through the results pages returned by Google. When I gave a look on the title and description of returned results. I saw one of top ten results with unique title “Zomato” – I liked this name at first and as I clicked on this and saw the site – a word came from my mouth – WOW! – THAT’s what I was looking for:

When I opened this site it seemed so impressive.. I just said… WOW!. I love food and going in fun parties. I was very excited for this party. I started navigating Zomato.com homepage. At first, I was thinking of whether it’s a restaurant or something else. Then I saw text “EXPLORE restaurants by locality in your city” on top of the front page. I thought.. Zomato might have many branches in different locations as there was mentioned metro and other cities name on top of the site: Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Jaipur, Ahmedabad & Chandigarh.

As I’m from Delhi that’s why I clicked “Delhi NCR” link, a page opened – it was appearing on the page: “Featured User”, “Reviews Events at Restaurants”, “Our Editors”, etc in the middle of the page. I started scrolling down… I found that the site containing web pages like “From Our Blog”, “From Our Newsletter Crunch”, “Hot Restaurants Today”, “Newly Added Menus”.

As I kept scrolling down through the page, the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android apps I saw at right and says – Zomato.com provides apps for smartphones. I said to myself – Cool product!… As we know, with the world going more mobile, finding that restaurant.. I was happy to see that Zomato.com is smartphone friendly. Well…at first, what came in my mind, it would be a restaurant but later I realized that it’s not a restaurant listing site only but more than that.

For long time I was searching website related to this kind information i am very happy to find it here. As usual, I started playing with this site. As I scrolled down the page. I found that it is mentioned “17,800 listed restaurant”, “1,627 foodies online now”, “1,063,957 foodies served in August”, “8,547,360 foodies served till date”, “Popular on Zomato – Delhi NCR” and more… After giving a look on these pages it has been confirmed that Zomato is a local restaurant finder guide. After navigating to other pages in Zomato.com, I found that it’s a complete Restaurant Guide and currently serves Ten major cities in India – Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Kolkata, Bangalore, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Jaipur & Chandigarh. The website currently lists over 17,800 restaurants and featured menus for restaurants listed on the website. As per recent press reports, Zomato claims that it gets more than a million customers on its website.

Zomato has the first local restaurants search iPhone, Android and BlackBerry application in India. Cool features!! After seeing its all features it was confirmed that we don’t need to google every time for good restaurant. I thought, why not first I install the Zomato BlackBerry app on my device – I installed it and started browsing restaurant names and read the reviews of few restaurants wrote by guests, what type, style or cuisine they’re serving, whether they provides live music or not….offer a wide selection of liquors, beers and wines as well as non-alcoholic beverages and punches. And also checked – what kind of other services listed restaurants are providing to its customers. I found listed a good range of restaurants on the site. Once you started using it, I am sure you will fall in love with it.

As much as staying with Zomato.com site or its smartphone app you will find some many good restaurants in your local area where people can go to enjoy different styles of food in various atmospheres that are interesting and intriguing. I just started dreaming about the party we planned .. we are in a party and having great fun with live music and dance….

Now it came time to decide on a restaurant for a group dinner (party of five – Gimme 5 gang) in GK locality where we can organize a party in our style.

I opened Zomato.com and clicked DINE-OUT option under EXPLORE, as it selected this, it appeared an additional option – check option “Search for restaurants in 4 / 5 star hotels only” – if you are looking for only 4/5 star hotels restaurant. I unchecked this optioned. In location field, I entered only GK2 ..since I’m living in GK, New Delhi., due to “auto complete feature” on this site it entered automatically “GREATER KAILASH (GK) 2, DELHI. Next option I have to select “Cuisine”.. in our gang, two guys are from North India (Delhi and Chandigarh), one from South India (Bangalore), one form North-East and last one from Mumbai. Each guy belongs to different region and each has different taste of tongue and so I selected MULTI CUISINE.

Zomato has returned two restaurant results near by GK:

While searching for a restaurant, I tried their advanced search feature for filtering results. I filtered the results by following categories: Open Now, Location, Cuisine, Cost of two, Pure Veg., Credit Cards, Buffet, Happy Hours, Wifi, Bar present, Bar not present, Live music, Outdoors, 4/5 * Hotels.

Finally, I filtered the results by Bar present, Live music, Wifi and Outdoors, Zomato returned two results and one of two results was “Zook” restaurant. I thought before finalizing the restaurant, I should read about Zook, live music service, liquors quality and variance and what kind of cuisines they serve and other required services as well. After going through these all things and also I read some reviews .. most guests wrote: Nice place to chilled out. Good varieties of food and hookah. I just love the place”. Great place,specially on weekends with friends! Nice place for a hanging out or for a party. Rocking music. Good ambiance and good food.

Also, I saw the photos of restaurant interiors – looked awesome and rocking. On the day, this party was organizing in Zook, there is Unconventional Jam on the same day.

So finally we selected “Zook” for our “Gimme 5 Gang” party. All five guys were happy with selection of the restaurant “Zook”. Now, we started waiting for this rocking day. Finally that day has come. We all friends arrived at 8:20pm and but one of the friends asked us – Should I come with my girl friend. We told him, No problem, Dude! Today’s our day – come with your girlfriend.

It was rocking party and we had a great fun there. I must THANKS to ZOMATO because we got a good restaurant due to Zomato.com. After enjoying this party we named this party “Zomato Night @GK2″.

Last but not least…. just I wanna say.. it was rocking party organized due to Zomato restaurant guide. This site has so many featured, we do not need to go anywhere or ask anybody and just keep Zomato apps installed on your smartphone device — Stay connected with Zomato, Stay with Tasty Food and Fun.

Categories: Restaurant Directory | Restaurant Guide | Restaurant Listing | Restaurant in Metro Cities

I have been living in Delhi for a long time but never really gone to see Taj Mahal at Agra which is one of the wonders of the world. Last weekend, I had planned a trip for Agra. So I started to try to figure out the best way to reach Agra.

I know that there are trains that run from Delhi and back and Shatabdi Express is one of best trains that takes approximately 3 hours each way. However, I was thinking that perhaps a private taxi or by own car may be better option as we won’t be bound by the train schedule and we’ll have a reliable mode of transportation while in Agra. My wife and I finally decided to go there by our own car because it’s been quite a long time I did not take a long drive for pleasure.

However, I have heard that road from Delhi to Agra by car is also very pleasant. One of my friends suggested a trick – to leave early by 5:00 am and that way you can be back home by 8 pm. We decided to go early to bed and that night, just after we had our dinner, I knocked out of bed.

One way was about 4 hrs. The only glitch we ran into was, when we were returning to Delhi, there was a overloaded bus stucked into a cantilever bridge in Agra city and I was just behind the bus, that lost us about half an hour. The roads were not a problem at all.

My wife was so enthralled by view of greens and sometimes she spot forts and just kept on snapping pictures. We both were very excited to see Taj Mahal. I felt so excited at that moment since I only see Taj Mahal in books, TV and internet. My first thought was, this is going to be real great seeing one of the wonders on the world, once in a lifetime experience. At 10 am, I reached and parked my car in parking area. The gates are about a 5 minute walk from the actual entrance to the Taj. There are cycle-rickshaws available, but we decided to walk.

Only drinking water is allowed to bring inside Taj Mahal because of possible garbage. They are also afraid of corrosion on the marble from the soft-drinks, etc. The guards check each one by one before you enter the place. There are many hawkers standing outside Taj Mahal. They make a sport of fooling tourists, and they brag about it to each other afterwards.

Long queue just to get inside and the security was tight, but that’s good at least to keep the place safe and clean. I was a bit irritated by the idea of waiting in the long line. The queue was quite long for tickets that’s why I asked my wife to take two tickets as the queue for women was separate and shorter than men queue. Separate queue lines were for men and women to enter in Taj Mahal. That’s why my wife and I were standing in two separate queue lines. When I asked my wife… please give me my ticket then she told me the ticket guy had given me single ticket only for both. When we reached at entrance gate as we showed the ticket to security people and they said this ticket is only for one person – I shocked to hear this thing and became angry on my wife. But she said calmly – while buying the ticket I had asked the ticket guy to give ticket for two persons but ticket guy said to me, it’s for two persons. The queue was so long and weather was so hot she didn’t check the ticket properly and that’s why it happened.

Finally somehow my wife convinced the securities people and we entered into Taj Mahal. Best part was, my annoyance vanished as soon as I set my eyes on the Taj. I was like “WOW”. Breathtaking, marvelous, wonderful, amazing! I will run out of words to describe what I’m seeing. It was just so overwhelming. A real epitome of love and romance leaves one mesmerized. The essential focus of the compound is the mausoleum; this large, white marble structure stands on a square base and consists of a proportioned building with an arch-shaped doorway topped by a large ground and finial. It was built by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan for his most beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal. I was so fascinated with the place that we didn’t even notice the time. It was almost 2 pm. I’m still mesmerized with the experience when we were getting out of the place and I was so happy to see such a beautiful structure and for sure memories of the Taj will last in my mind until the day I die.

Around 2 pm, we left for Delhi and after driving continuously 2 hours I stopped my car at one of dhabas on the highway and told my wife – today we should eat dhaba food and she agreed on this. We ordered some food and had tea also though we were carrying enough snacks and foods with us. The food was nice. About 7 pm we entered in Delhi and reached home about 8 pm.

The Taj was marvelous, wonderful and amazing….our tiredness gone and we fell asleep immediately. It was really wonderful trip we had never before.