Jakarta to host restaurant festival
A 28-day restaurant festival will be held in Jakarta this month starting from April 21 to celebrate the city's culinary diversity.
Initiated by Qraved.com, Jakarta's restaurant discovery and reservations service, the so-called EATJakarta Festival will offer more than 100 hand-picked affordable set menus (consisting of two- to three-course meals) with starting prices of Rp 100,000 (US$8.80) from more than 100 participating mid- to high-end restaurants in the capital city such as Rosso, Potato Head, Harumanis, AMUZ, La Luce and Bistronomy.
"This is not a new idea since great restaurant festivals have been celebrated in cities such as New York City, London and Sydney. But it didn't exist here in Jakarta. So, after two months of preparation, we are finally ready to introduce Jakarta and its huge variety of global cuisine to the world as an exciting dining and culinary capital," Qraved.com co-founder and CEO Steven Kim told a press conference on Wednesday.
To participate, Jakartans can visit www.eatjakarta.org, choose one of the participating restaurants, browse the set menus available and then click "Book Now" to make a reservation online using the Qraved platform.
Apart from online booking, people who wanted to try a particular set menu could also order them directly at participating restaurants.
Set to become an annual event, EATJakarta will also run fun and social quizzes and competitions from Instagram photo submissions to Twitter quizzes and dining league tables.
According to Qraved's Jakarta Dining Index released last year, Indonesians dined out an estimated 380 million times in 2013 spending around $1.5 billion. No wonder mid- to high-end restaurants have grown by over 250% in the last five years and the F&B industry is growing significantly in Jakarta.
Jakarta's diners are also found to prefer to dine out on weekends and tend to make a reservation at restaurants especially on important or celebratory occasions. To grab this market, Qraved presently has around 800 restaurants available and customers can view photos, menus, reviews and locations of the venues they are interested in as well as making a reservation for free.
"After five months of operating, now we have around 30,000 active users, more than 500,000 website visits per month and 15,000 to 20,000 diners making their bookings through Qraved," said Kim.
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