WHILE most humans eat to live, in Pakistan most of us live to eat. With a decline in home cooking, eating out has become a major pastime; in fact, no outing with friends or family is complete without a snack or meal at a restaurant or club. While other avenues for entertainment, such as bowling alleys and movie cinemas, have sprung up, restaurants continue to outnumber these, and consequently draw the bulk of the amusement-seeking population.
Where word-of-mouth recommendations and press reviews used to determine the choice of eatery, Internet now offers a plethora of readily available information that is indispensable to both regular restaurant patrons and the not-so-regular ones. Web sites provide names, addresses, and telephone numbers of restaurants in major Pakistani cities, while reviewing them in terms of food, decor, service, and price. Some furnish this information with the view to guiding tourists. Others go further, and take into account the needs of individual patrons-to-be.
One such web page is http://www.paktaste.com/restaurant/home.asp. Here, one can find seemingly endless options for eating places in Karachi, starting with a feature called ‘Today’s Restaurant’, that links to a menu and list of prices for the selected eatery. There are restaurants to suit virtually every mood and occasion, as well as a recipes option for those who either are not satisfied with the eateries suggested or have not yet completely given up on cooking at home. Practical features, such as ‘Great Discount’, which lists restaurants offering discounts of as much as 15 per cent and includes printable coupons for each of these places, and ‘Home Delivery’, set this web page apart from the rest.
Those who are interested in eating at a Chinese restaurant in Karachi would find a useful guide in http://www.karachiplus.com/karachi_info/channel.asp?find=fp3. This web page is part of a web site that lists restaurants according to the type of cuisine they offer (Chinese, barbecue, fast food, etc.) under a section called ‘+ Food Plus’. Although the web site is limited in its choice of food themes and does not provide reviews, it is ideal for people who know exactly what type of food they want to try out and want to find out the kind of prices is the food available. For the undecided, a complete list of restaurants to be found in Karachi is provided in both ‘+ Food Plus’ and ‘+ Business Plus’.
In-depth information on meals served (whether lunch, dinner, etc.), price range (in dollars), whether or not credit cards are accepted, and so on can be found through http://www.restaurants.com/World/WCuisine.asp?Country=PK&Cuisine=Input&City=Karachi. However, these are limited for some well-known restaurants of the city. But the descriptions of each restaurant are so exhaustive that they answer practically every question that a potential patron browsing the web page might have had. This interactive web page permits customers to post their own comments and ratings, and e-mail a particular restaurant’s details to a friend who might be from out-of-town and looking for a good eatery to try out.
For those who travel frequently within Pakistan, the Hotel and Travel Guide at http://www.cybercity-online.net/hotels.htm#isd can be a good starting point. It lists hotels and restaurants in major cities of Pakistan, as well as information on tour operators, travel agents, and rent-a-car service providers. This web page does not, however, give names of restaurants in Islamabad, a deficiency that is more than compensated for by http://www.geocities.com/prpakistan_yellow_pages_of_isb/restaurant_&_snack_bars.htm and http://www.geocities.com/prpakistan_yellow_pages_of_isb/restaurant_chines.htm). Some of the restaurants named are located in the hotels listed and are therefore easily accessible to the latter’s guests. The business traveller staying at a multi-star hotel in Rawalpindi who is tired of hotel fare and wants to branch out would do well to visit http://www.apnaislamabad.com/cookbook/food.asp. Here, he or she can search for neighbourhood eateries, or even find the cheapest places serving ice-cream in the twin cities. This web page also includes a food poll. Conversely, a resident of Islamabad or Rawalpindi who is planning to visit Karachi or Lahore can look up restaurants in Apna Islamabad’s sister sites, Apna Karachi and Apna Lahore.
These three web sites are an authority on virtually everything that goes on in their respective cities, and contain information that would come as news to both residents and non-residents. As far as restaurants are concerned, Apna Karachi, like Apna Islamabad, allows for quite a detailed search by geographical area, price type, and variety of food (Apna Lahore does not offer as many options in its search).
The last stop for tourists and non-tourists alike looking for a good meal should be http://www.virtualtourist.com/vt/6fb/. Although the reviews leave much to be desired in terms of grammar, spelling and punctuation, they are quite analytical inasmuch as they recommend dishes, give price ranges (in dollars, which can be easily changed to Pakistani rupees with the help of the ‘Currency Converter’ feature), and rate restaurants. One can find restaurant reviews for practically every city of Pakistan through this page. Clicking on ‘Lahore’ lower down the web page allows one to find reviews for some of the eateries for which this food-loving city is famous; in addition, the reviews are organized according to topic, such as ‘Sweets of Lahore’, and name the best places for a particular type of food. One can also submit feedback on how useful and accurate the ratings are for each restaurant reviewed.
The final say in dining out is best left to the individual web sites of restaurants. Although official web sites are nowhere near as objective as the ones that provide restaurant reviews, they ultimately win, rather than drive away, potential patrons. They also help one to focus attention on a particular restaurant, something which is not possible when there are lists upon lists of restaurants and only reviews to set them apart from each other. Here, the disadvantage to the patron-to-be is that there are not many restaurants in Pakistan that have their own web sites; the ones that do, inevitably edge out the ones that do not.
It would be a good idea for high-end restaurants to invest money and effort in building web sites of their own, since many of the customers they wish to draw probably spend a substantial part of their lives on the Internet.
WHILE most humans eat to live, in Pakistan most of us live to eat. With a decline in home cooking, eating out has become a major pastime; in fact, no outing with friends or family is complete without a snack or meal at a restaurant or club. While other avenues for entertainment, such as bowling alleys and movie cinemas, have sprung up, restaurants continue to outnumber these, and consequently draw the bulk of the amusement-seeking population.
