Poor serving for e-meals

CHRIS BARTON finds that choosing and booking a restaurant online is not as easy as you think.

This should have been a cinch. Find a restaurant and book a dinner or lunch online. Piece of cake in a web-enabled world, right? Sadly, no.

While there are plenty of restaurant listings out there, only a small number have their own websites - and hardly any provide online bookings. E-mail is generally not on the menu.

I had also been told by others who have tried that even when you do send an online booking, the restaurants don't reply.

Fortunately, there are some exceptions - and one of them is getting my patronage this week as a result.

With so much choice for eating out in Auckland, I figured the web would be the perfect way to find exactly what I wanted.

After all, a restaurant website isn't that complicated. All it needs to show is the current menu and wine list, with prices; give a sense of the ambience with a few photos; show contact and location details, preferably with a map; and provide online booking with confirmation by e-mail.

A bit of background about the place, the chef and staff is nice. And it would be utterly brilliant if I could find one that showed me a table floor plan - so I could choose where to sit.

I haven't found that feature yet - but if there are any out there, let me know and I'll pay a visit tout de suite.

But where to begin. Figuring I would be paralysed by choice in completing my online mission, I began with Cuisine's restaurant reviews.

I immediately liked the look of the new Hilton establishment - "White by name and white by design, this is cutting-edge decor that you will love or hate. We loved it, as it is a perfect foil for both trad black garb and the full palette of colour currently displayed by the fashionable and fancy".

I tracked down White through Hilton.com. But there was no menu or online booking. White-out.

So where next? DineOut understood my problem: "We all tend to go to restaurants our friends recommend, or ones we know well. When you want a new dining experience, the results can be quite hit and miss."

The site has a great database of restaurants and reviews - some by DineOut reviewers, and some "done by the public".

With enough participation this site could become a must-visit for about-to-be diners. Great also to have a place to give restaurants feedback.

But although many of the restaurants reviewed here gave food for thought, I was still struggling to find places with websites, let alone online booking. It would be nice if DineOut provided those links with its reviews.

Back at Cuisine, I liked the sound of Rice - "promises what many other new restaurants fail to deliver: a point of difference. The menu is focused on a theme - not surprisingly, rice".

Better still, the review mentioned a website. Not surprisingly, it was www.rice.co.nz. The site has it all - menus, wine list, prices, background, contact details and a map.

All that's missing are a few photos to show off the ambience. But would the online booking form work? I entered the details and hit submit around 10 am. The confirmation came back with a courteous, "We look forward to being of service to you and your party" by 2.30 pm - brilliant.

Flushed with success, I decided to try again. There's a massive listing of Auckland restaurants at Yellow Pages.

I narrowed my search to Auckland central and got 375 places - but only nine with website links. It was a similar story at entertainmentNZ.com - great list, few websites, but the ability to narrow the search by category such as brasseries, Cajun, Chinese, family, Greek, etc, was good.

The restaurant search page at Xtra's Out & About is comprehensive and easy to use - providing searches by style, cuisine, location, price and licence - but again websites are few and far between and some of the listings were well out of date.

For those favouring a more geographic search NZmaps is great - although the restaurant listings are a bit thin on the ground. Devonport, for example, lists only one restaurant - the Esplanade.

The best hunting grounds for restaurant websites were Auckland Restaurants.com and Menus.co.nz.

The latter does just what it says, providing sample menus for all the restaurants listed and the former links to restaurant websites.

In the end I settled on Cin Cin. Why? Because the site is superb - packed with information and beautifully presented. There's even a Quicktime virtual reality show of the harbour view.

The only thing missing is a current wine list with prices. I was looking forward to my Buccatini with duck, oyster mushrooms, lemon basil butter and asparagus ($21.90) - whatever that is.

And the Kumeu River Mate's Vineyard Chardonnay 1994 looked inviting. Apparently it's ageing well and 1994 was an excellent vintage.

But my best-laid web plans struck a glitch. I had submitted my booking about 6 pm on Saturday. By Monday morning there was still no reply. I rang in frustration.

"I'm sorry about that," came the sheepish reply. "The marketing lady [who responds to e-mail bookings] isn't here at the weekend."

Sigh ...

Cuisine Restaurant Reviews

DineOut

Rice

Yellow Pages restaurant listings

EntertainmentNZ restaurant guide

Xtra's Out and About

NZ Maps

Aucklandrestaurants.com

Menus.co.nz

Cin Cin