Culinary

Poor Google Maps Experience

Google Maps has very poor discovery feature to extent that it will not allow you to find the most rated one. That being said, even to date some of the top rated restaurants are still have way lower than mostly franchise based one which is a bigger challenge of Google Maps Usage.

No Exploration on Food Delivery Apps (FDA)

All of FDA only provide lists, mostly sorted by straight line distance, sometimes with added popularity scores which God only knows how and in most occasion worsen the result (clearly I don't want to buy 40k or even 100k with another 40k delivery fees even after discount, there's TF for that purpose). Typically this also accompanied with fluctuating delivery fees due its actual routes. Some FDA use indexing to improve performance, but limits user experience in exploring larger areas.

SF limits to ~800 merchants (depending on density could be below 2km radius with its rapid growth), while GF limits to merchants within 5km.

This is very lame if you compare with Accommodation Apps i.e.  Booking.com. True in deciding hotels people tends to know their proximity, but its also the same with FDA.

Poor History Logging on FDA

Another big issue is to date most of these FDA will purge your history after 3 months or so. In fact only GF who at least email you the receipt, making it almost impossible for Food Explorer to remember whether they already ordered from the same restaurant, let alone the specific menu. What they emphasis instead is to make you do a repeat order.

True some food are worth to repeat, I like McDonalds Spicy and usually order once a month or so, but this rarely applies for others. With prolonged WFH in this pandemic, in a year I simply already tried most of the merchants within the FDA limits which is quite lame.

Food Price Bias

There are actually stores who boost their prices knowing the discount they provided. It's the worst kind of stores, since technically those discounts is partially covered by FDA.

Another version, stores who has base price too high which is not worth the food, only because it's backed by chains of stores and good photos/promotion material which turns out different than the actual. 40k for few pieces of fillet chicken with subpar flavor from cloud kitchen definitely not worth it. What makes it worse is that in most occasion I noticed these stores still has high rating, which likely given when they made the food on promotional price.

Rating

A most simple approach. While it's quite useful but I've seen a lot of biased rating.

Reviews

Might yield more negative, complain related.

Comparison

Store A1 vs Store A2: poor branch experience

Store A vs Store B: provide expectation of similar experience with same price/food menu, provide comparison between same cuisine

Image

Share unboxing images, compare between stores photo vs actual. Details of packaging and serving

Video Reviews

A more social version, mainly with comment from the reviewer

Gamification

Ladder, badges, loyalty benefits for reviewers.

Examples:

• First 100 explored restaurant in a district

• First 50 noodles from different restaurants

I'd like to highlight stores which I've tried ordering around Bekasi. In My Maps below you can check several cuisines and merchants around Bekasi, Red means they are must try if you haven't already, Blue means they are just okay, Green means either I just happened to get poor experience or really not worth the try.

Later I will also make additional measure why a 50k martabak is worth it, why 50k chicken wings at least has to be more than 8 pieces, why a piece of chicken doesn't worth it above 30k. Of course there's always outliers, but here we will mostly talk about food on FDA.