The website chose to disqualify the thousands of angry reviews the restaurant received post social media outrage.
Popular Kolkata joint Mocambo, has been in the eye of the storm after allegedly denying entry to a driver. Earlier, the manager of Mocambo, Ashish Malik on Wednesday said the eatery doesn't believe in discrimination, while asserting that the driver who had come along with a woman was 'dirtily dressed'.
Mocambo found itself in a soup, after a woman named Dilashi Hemnani alleged that the eatery did not let her driver inside for dinner. "She was a well to do lady of course. When she came, she asked for a table for two. The person who was there said of course we will give you table. We don't have any discrimination... we allow everybody. After some time, the person who was giving the table asked her...please call your friend and she pointed out to a guy, who was very dirtily dressed...absolutely dirty," Malik told ANI. The incident took place on September 9, when Hemnani walked into Mocambo along with her driver but failed to secure a seat even after waiting for some time and requesting to the staff.
Outraged at their behaviour, Hemnani went on to allege that the restaurant deliberately chose to keep her away because she was accompanied by her driver who didn't meet the restaurant's standards of a well-dressed customer. The Congress held a demonstration on Tuesday afternoon outside Mocambo asking for the manager to be arrested.
One of the fall-outs of the incident was that a lot of people went on Zomato to downgrade the restaurant. However, Zomato stepped in to quell the bad press. Abhishek Mukherjee, an avid Mocambo fan and had written a negative review received an email: “At Zomato, our goal is to enable people to make informed decisions on whether or not to dine at a place based on the real and personal experiences of people who've been there. Therefore, our policies are designed to protect the neturality of the platform against reviews that are not reflective of users' first-hand experiences. In keeping with this, your review has been taken down.”
Abhishek Mukherjee told dna: "I used to be a big fan of the mulligatawny soup, devilled crab, chateaubriand steak, baked Alaska, and more. However, there are some things more important than one's culinary buds. What felt worse was Zomato's generalisation that I have never visited Mocambo. I used to be a frequenter, and have visited the restaurant every single time I visit Kolkata. Unfortunately, Zomato refused to acknowledge the fact that I was (do note the past tense) a frequenter. This was my review: >> Terrible, atrocious attitude, disgraceful customer service. Used to be a regular. Will not be visiting anymore. Thanks for the memories. Zomato have also raised concerns that reviews should ideally be neutral. The response is obvious: can ratings be neutral? Are we not biased by our experiences at the restaurant?
Moreover, does Zomato test the credibility of every person who dines at every single restaurant? I presume not, for had they read my review, they would have known immediately that I am a frequenter. One more thing about ratings: should ambience and staff not influence the rating? If yes, what went wrong when Mocambo was thus rated? No, Zomato's logic made little sense. Worse, it strengthened my belief that Zomato plays zero attention towards causes that need to be addressed. As for Mocambo, indeed, thanks for all the nice memories"
However, upon receiving Abhishek Mukherjee's reply that he indeed was a loyal customer, Zomato replied back saying:
Meanwhile, in their blog Zomato said: “The incident has gone massively viral on social media, and everyone is up in arms against the restaurant. Since then, there has been a flood of reviews for the restaurant on Zomato – as many as 5000 in a day – and their rating has dropped from a very respectable 4.3 to a disastrous 1.8.”
Explaining that when there’s an ‘outpouring of negative reviews for a particular restaurant, our anti-spam systems take a pause, and flags the issue to our moderators as a potential ‘social issue’’.
They added: “Here’s why – while we agree that Zomato is a technology platform that shouldn’t take sides, and should stick to the rule book that we have created for ourselves, in such social cases, we have to look deep within us and ask ourselves the question – “what is the right thing to do?”.”
The blog further said: “This incident, if indeed it happened verbatim, highlights the elitism of some hospitality businesses in India. Of all the countries that we operate in, India is the only one in which we hear of such incidents on an ongoing basis. It’s taken us centuries to supposedly move away from the class system, but traces of that still remain within our society. Such incidents is when things blow up and the chinks in the armour of our modern society become visible.” The blog also added that Mocambo wasn’t an advertiser but their review policy would be always neutral.
Here's Mocambo's official statement about the incident:
With inputs from agencies
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