What’s cooking on Zomato? Dubious restaurants with absurd pricing sparks row

Zomato on Wednesday issued a clarification on the matter relating to potentially fraudulent restaurants selling suspicious items on the food-delivery platform with absurd names and exorbitant prices, saying it has identified and delisted these deceitful entities.

“We have noticed social media conversations around single-dish restaurants listed on Zomato. We have identified all such restaurants that were potentially fraudulent and have delisted them from our platform. To solve this more comprehensively, we have also investigated all other restaurants which have a very limited menu on Zomato and might have listed prohibited items or worked around a way to list prohibited items,” the food-delivery giant posted on the social media platform X.

What’s the Zomato controversy?

For a couple of days, social media users have been posting about finding dubious restaurants in Chandigarh selling only one item with weird names and costing a hefty amount. Netizens have been guessing what the culinary items could be and many theories have been running through the internet.

Dishes with bizarre names like ‘Naughty Strawberry’, ‘Blue Adventure’, ‘Citrus Punch’, ‘Merry Berry’, etc. were listed on the restaurant’s menu without any description of the items. The prices of these items are mostly between ₹900 to ₹1500, considerably high for food items.

An X user named Nitish Anand shared screenshots of these offerings and said, “What’s going on with Zomato in Chandigarh? Fake ‘restaurants’ offering just ONE dish at absurd prices, with nonexistent addresses. Something really shady is cooking on.”

Anand later wrote that he tried ordering from these restaurants and after a long wait, the order was rejected and his money was returned. Later, the restaurant stopped accepting orders. He said that the happenings were ‘very very sus’, that is, extremely suspicious.

Some of the theories include that these restaurants may have been selling drugs or vapes (electronic cigarettes), or could be fronts for money laundering.

Several users tagged Chandigarh Police and Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal to draw their attention to the matter.

Zomato’s clarification

In a post on X, Zomato said all restaurants on its platform are required to have an FSSAI licence, as per its policy, and the food-delivery platform actively blocks items including alcohol, cigarettes, and vapes, among others on its application.

The post added that these restaurants were able to trespass these checks by using generic names for dishes like ‘Naughty Strawberry’ and ‘Merry Berry’.

“We have further strengthened our fraud checks to proactively identify such cases to avoid similar incidents in the future” Zomato stated.