Zomato Shut Down Australian Restaurant Reviews

Like many aussies, I loved UrbanSpoon, it seemed to give impressively reliable reviews and worked better than anything else at the time. It was bought by zomato for $60m a few years ago and ‘merged’ into the zomato app/website, the urban spoon app and website were both shutdown, and although reviews made in UrbanSpoon were became visible on zomato, usage of the zomato app dropped and new reviews were rare. Over time reviews become stale and zomato became less useful.

There was also a brief period (perhaps a month or so, but someone else might know better) where zomato tried to force logging in just to read reviews (!) - I don’t think that worked well because they reverted sometime shortly after.

The zomato data breach probably didn’t help them either.

Of ~$60m they paid for UrbanSpoon, it’s brutal to think that’s mostly (all?) worthless now.