A couple of days back we assumed that the Costa Coffee outlet at Amanora Town Center was open for business. It wasn't. However, since we were there and hungry we ended up going to Oye Pape. The restaurant is done up in some semi-kitschy way that is neither here and nor there and, the off-the-wall lights weren't too helpful in highlighting anything. The menu, as is somewhat expected, promised all sorts of things - Punjabi, Chinese, Mexican and what not.

The order was placed for some buttermilk and lassi. Surprisingly enough, they ended up misunderstanding that and bringing out double the order for all the drinks. The lassi was thick, creamy and generally good. The main dishes were Paneer Lababdar with roti, Amritsar Choley Kulcha, Mutton Kolhapuri and a Cheese Tex Mex Sizzler. It takes a rare eating joint which ensures that the order of arrival of the dishes are completely messed up. An even strange aspect was the food - it was completely without taste. I've had badly cooked food, undercooked, overboiled and everything in-between. I've never had food that didn't have a taste. The Kulcha was a twin of aloo paratha with the same texture and stuffing and the Choley was more of gravy than choley. The Kolhapuri was without taste and by all reports so was the sizzler. This puzzles me. The food didn't cause any upset tummy - a plus there, but it didn't have taste. How does that happen ?

The staff are not comfortable in English but will not fall back to Hindi to make things easy. So, do take care when placing the order. Actually, I'd recommend giving this a miss.

I was looking through this review and noticed a strange thing - the original reviewer found his/her own review "helpful". Either burrp.com is slipping up or, they don't appear to give a rodent's posterior to user reviews. I tend to think that it is the latter. Else reviews like these along with some like these shouldn't actually get posted if they haven't gone through a bit of spelling, grammar and accuracy checks by the site editors. The abominable spelling bits is not limited to this site though. A quick glance through most of the ones on tripadvisor reveal the same trend. Which brings up the question as to why the text input area doesn't offer a default spell-check. Don't the sites care for the quality of the reviews ?

Speaking of quality of the reviews, burrp.com could perhaps start using a template. Personally, if I am going to look up an eating joint there are a few things I am curious about :

• quality of food - was it 'memorable' ? As in, would you visit it again with friends ?
• quantity of food - was it 'tiny piece of chicken on a huge plate' ? Or, would you say that it was good enough as expected ?
• hygiene/cleanliness - cutlery, crockery, upholstery and the rest-rooms
• ambience - how is the place ? noisy/relaxed/smoky etc
• kind of food - is the menu treading on 'safe ground' ? Or, does it allow you to indulge in something out of the ordinary ?
• service - is the service snappy or, snobbish ? Do they listen to what you were saying ?
• time of the day - what time of the day did you visit ?
• your meal - what did you order ? How was it presented ?

That's probably the basic list of stuff that should be there. Most of the time the reviews are either gushing with misdirected praise or, seething with inappropriate anger. Will these sites ever shape up and fix things ? I don't think so. Not unless they see an alternative site coming up with enough eyeball power to goad them into healing themselves.