What will you do when your hunger pangs begin troubling you continually? You will try to find a good place to eat nearby your area, wouldn’t it? Just wait for a while, and catch hold of this new local food and lifestyle recommendation engine Zootout.com, which aims to help visitors in discovering their favorites based on their interests and preferences. Visitors not only obtain the accurate details about numerous places of their city, but also view the specialty of that place. Zootout currently provides listings in the food and nightlife section only and soon coming up in other genres like beauty and fitness, shopping, deals and discount, events and sale. A space where the Info Edge backed – Zomato and Infomedia18′s restaurant guide – Burrp already have their strong hold, this new start-up seems to be diverse.

Indore-based Zootout, a brainchild of 3 young entrepreneurs Subrat Kar, Sukrat Ray and Manish Vaswani, was launched as beta on 26th January. According to the founders, Zootout’s unique aspect is that it focus on offering the specialties of establishments listed, instead of simply putting across the menu card or list of items. Presently, in a very short span of time, it has spread its wings around 13 major cities in India also in Singapore. Indian cities include Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chandigarh, Chennai, Delhi, Goa, Hyderabad, Indore, Jaipur, Kochi, Kolkota, Mumbai and Pune. There are even plans to add other top cities within couple of months.

There are both online and offline presence in Indore, while in most of the cities the presence is limited to online but plans to replicate offline presence too. Apart from acting as a Food & Lifestyle guide, Zootout also involved in Zootout Elite and Zootout Social. Zootout Elite is a membership which gives discount on top outlets of the city and Zootout Social is being started from the commercial Capital of Central India. Zootout has a pioneering revenue stream, which is being tested in Indore. This is a mobile cloud based platform for restaurants, which will provide real time discounts on restaurants plus the product will assist restaurants to run their customer loyalty programs.

The website has a clean and aesthetic look which is very eye-catching. The search section is remarkable also equipped with an auto-complete feature and provides suggestions. Users can search for their favorite restaurant/cuisine by mentioning particular place in the search box or browse through places listings across the different categories such as bars, restaurant, lounge, cafe, pub; diverse cuisines such as North Indian, Chinese, fast food, desserts, continental; as well browse places through service offerings such as home delivery, air conditioned, dine-in, take away, etc.

Besides the regular search options of restaurants and cuisine, you could even search for places that serve a particular dish. For example, you can look for places which serve “Punjabi Mix Paratha”. As the search box has an auto-complete feature, if you type in a general dish like ‘Paratha’ or ‘Pizza’, it advises various alternatives of the dish being served, in a way encourages the discovery of new dishes. Suppose you type the word Paratha, you will see its different variants such as Chocolate Paratha, Ceylon Paratha, Non Veg Paratha, Chilli Cheese Paratha, Aloo Masala Paratha, etc. while Pizza search will show variants like Pizza Margherita, Tabasco Pizza, etc.

When you visit the homepage, check out the different guides like Best Chinese Restaurants, Best South Indian Restaurants, Unique Themed Restaurants, etc., which expectedly include restaurant listings catering to a precise genre or cuisine. The most interesting thing is that these guides work somewhat like lists on Twitter or more suitably, Foursquare. The in-house staff has produced all the lists at present; however hope that users will be able to make lists on their own in the future. With branded lists, this might be an excellent monetization chance for the company.

Each outlet page of Zootout have a fanatical section known as “what’s special here,” to inform you about the special dishes presented in that outlet. You can mark the offered dishes as “Love it”, “Like it”, “Want To Try,” “Not For Me” or you can recommend your own dishes and upload images of it also. Zootout offers a suggestion fee to those who advise places to their catalog, like a bid to incentivize users so that they insert more places to their listings. However, there are no details on how significant is the suggestion fee.

Zootout.com considers that mostly every restaurant offers at least one delicious but the unique dish to tempt food-lovers. On the site, no dislike or comment option is offered, thus Zootout.com is unique by staying Positive in terms of feedback. Some unique features are also available at the site to differentiate it from its competitors as it has a long way to go. When it comes to restaurants, Burrp and Zomato are the first places for people to visit. Moreover, other new features like deals, etc. should be started fast for people. It may happen that competitors will begin to integrate the all special features of Zootout, as a result, Zootout may lose out afterwards. Seeing this, it becomes inevitable for Zootout to publicize itself rapidly.

Positive points:

• Online food recommendation engine to discover new restaurants around you
• Help in finding the place where you’ll obtain your preferred dish
• Inform about the Specialty Dish which you’ll acquire at the place you are planning to visit
• Follow Food Experts, Personalities, and Friends for finding out what people like to eat
• Share, Love, Like food or drink, and give suggestion to make Zootout.com better
• Guide helps Zooters to get most helpful, relevant and updated recommendations

Negative points:

• Service available to fewer cities only

Zootout video from youtube: