menukarma blog

I vowed I’d never let this become another damned “restaurant review blog”. My personal impressions with specific restaurants are outside the intended scope of this blog. But it does seem inescapable that I should visit at least some of the 4,000+ San Francisco restaurants listed on menukarma.com, and occasionally feel compelled to write about some number of those. I have decided, however, not to suppress the impulse to write, but rather to try to use it to observe something about the restaurant from the online marketing perspective.

Tonight was the second time I visited Eden’s Turkish Food. Both times I had the Lamb Kebab Platter, and thought it a good value for under $10. I recommend it as an excellent take-out choice for anyone living in the Nob Hill/Tenderloin area. It shares the same block on Jones Street with Dottie’s True Blue Cafe and Chutney Indian Restaurant.

The first thing I did to begin my online situation analysis was I Googled “Eden’s Turkish Food”. And I was not at all surprised to find that a Yelp review was present and in the top position. This part of town is apparently very well trawled by avid Yelpers, as is the rest of San Francisco, for that matter. Yelp’s impressive penetration of San Francisco restaurants owes in no small part, I think, to the fact that Yelp is headquartered right here in SOMA.

There’s some pretty enlightening stuff for the proprietors of Eden’s to read among the Yelp reviews, not the least of which was: “I would have paid another $0.50 to be able to picture the chicken I ate having lived a happier life than it probably did, but it still all came together in a nice, comfort-food way“, LOL

What did surprise me among the page-one Google results, however, was to find that Eden’s Turkish Food has its own web site, and a pretty damned good one, too. It’s not flashy or anything.  But it is simple and effective. It has the two items of content a recent Coyle Group Restaurant Survey revealed are the most important to prospective diners online — the menu and pictures of the dining area and food. The site even has some very respectable SEO, as evidenced by the thoughtful meta tagging:

meta name=”title” content=”Eden’s Turkish Food” />

meta name=”description” content=”Inexpensive yet tasty Mediterranean food” />

meta name=”keywords” content=”restaurant, Mediterranean restaurant, Greek food, Turkish food, fast food, Union Square, Tenderloin, Nob Hill, vegetarian” />

That’s really pretty good.  Kudos, Eden’s.

I’m not advocating that a restaurant must have a web site. Certainly, it is one of menukarma’s most important aims to provide good, basic information on behalf of restaurants who do not have their own sites. There are some of you, however, who don’t have web sites, but really should – simply because it’s cheaper and easier than you think. And there’s also a lot of room for your creative talent on the web. In another article, I chided noob restaurateurs for over-indulging their creativity, and putting too much passion in their concepts and menus, at the expense of business sense. Here’s an opportunity to channel that irrepressible individuality into a positive. Quirky designs that flout conventional web design principles are in. Eschew the gloss. The public will readily forgive a new restaurant for not having the flashiest site on the web, especially if it’s clever and doesn’t take itself too seriously. A simple web site might even be a complement to your brand, say for example if your values as a restaurant include giving people a lot for their money.

Here’s a simple, little 1-page web site that I admire. For what it is, it couldn’t be any better than it is. It gives you an exterior picture, an interior picture, a few sentences “about us” and a selection of specialties from the house. I especially like this last item, in lieu of a full menu — since it conveys something about what the kitchen believes it does well, without committing the chef to anything too specific. The page also has some nice meta-tags. Check out the HTML source code. Good job, Auberge la Cabirotade!