menukarma blog

Government-imposed food labeling requirements have had a profound influence on the packaged food industry. They have also trained the consumer to expect nutritional information to be available whenever they make a food purchase. It will probably be a long time before restaurants are required to disclose nutritional information, but it’s not a bad time to think about doing it voluntarily — like on your web site.

I can confirm that search engine queries containing the terms “nutrition” and “calories” are definitely on the rise. People are coming to menukarma searching for nutritional information about specific prepared foods (especially ethnic foods), and they are also looking for nutritional information about the food from specific restaurants and chains.

I can tell you that the most nutritionally scrutinized menu on menukarma is the IHOP menu. What I cannot tell from my referrer logs is whether people are looking up the calories and fat of a Grilled Turkey Super Stacker with hopefulness before they indulge, or afterwards, with guilt and regret.

I’ll leave that for the good folks at IHOP to worry about.

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.