Good food can do magic. It can mend broken hearts, bring friends together and bring a smile. Now a Facebook group is bringing together total strangers across Kochi who share a common love for good food.
“Eat Kochi Eat” aka EKE had a viral growth within months of launch and still continues to gain strength with new members joining in every day. How fast? From the time this article was drafted and published, the group had added over 5,000 new foodies! So, whats the hype all about?
An independent group of foodies, sharing their reviews of the hottest new food joints from across the city. You get authentic reviews of amazing dishes from restaurants with their original pictures and not the make believe ones that they put up in ads and menus.
These reviews are put up by normal people like you and me with no incentive whatsoever, but out of pure love and commitment to food! You also get to know about the places you shouldn’t visit and the dishes you should probably avoid. In this world, you can put in your queries such as;
Which is the restaurant that serves the best steak?
What is the specialty of XYZ restaurant?
Where can I have authentic abc dish?
Now this group serves a very particular niche of Kochites, the kind of brave people who do not order the safe biriyani every damn time and the food connoisseurs who believe in titillating the taste buds. A virtual group for foodies, from foodies.
Whenever the members visit a restaurant, they post pictures of the food they had and write a review. All of us here at CochinSquare, have a list of restaurants/cafes to visit curated from EKE reviews alone! With the crowd sourced inputs, the list keeps growing faster than we manage to cross them off!
Eat Kochi Eat (EKE) also organizes frequent meet-ups to develop the interactions within the community. The meet-ups are sometimes well-planned with a focus on exploring a certain cuisine or an area. The last event was ‘Explore Shaappu’ at the Nettoor Shaap. The one before that, a “Food Walk” in which they explored all the eateries in Mattanchery! There are unplanned meet-ups or ‘Raids’ where one of the members calls a Raid and suddenly a restaurant gets lucky and busy with a bunch of EKE members!
“We personally know more than a couple of restaurants whose sales have doubled because of the reviews in EKE”, said Karthik Murali, one of the admins of the group. To add to this, they also organize tasting sessions based on requests from restaurants.
The best part about the group is that, some of the restaurant owners are in it too. You would find them replying to the members’ appreciations & concerns and promising to improve their service in case of bad reviews. Eventually, the group works both ways: Spreading word about food and helping restaurants improve their quality.
You can join the group by clicking right here. Are you a EKE member already? Tell us what you love the most about this group in the comments below. Happy fooding!
Ranjini Shankar contributed to this article.
