Rating 1/10

I was hungry the other night and decided to order in using hungryhouse.co.uk. I chose Zulfi’s even though I had reservations choosing a place that not only specialised in a good curry but also pizzas, burgers, chicken and kebab! To put this in perspective,when was the last time you had a decent curry at Pizza express? What the hell I thought to myself – it seems that many of the other takeaways on hungryhouse.co.uk near me are up to the same gig.

I got the meal deal #8 which included a large chicken bhuna, large keema dopiaza, 1 tarka daal (side), 1 bolied rice, naan, 3 chapati, 1 mushroom bhaji, 2 popadom, 1 mango chutney. I requested cooking with no ginger and keema to be replaced by chicken. My requests were all met which was great but the food was of a poor quality.

I’m a curry fanatic and this cooking was just lazy. The lentil dish was so bland and overcooked. They could not even get the popadoms right which are so easy to make. All they had to do was deep fry but they had left mine out somewhere for too long and it was stale and soggy by the time it got to me.

The worst part of the service was the delivery. First I got a phone call 10 minutes before the latest time they should have delivered by asking me for my post code and address. I swear the whole point of this website is that details like this are not necessary! It was not like he was checking either – he just didn’t know! 20 minutes later I get a call from the delivery driver asking where I live. I had to open up google maps to help guide them in but the guy kept hanging up on me while I was explaining where to go so he kept getting lost. I don’t live in the middle of nowhere either – I live in Headingley! He kept asking me to go outside to the middle of the road so he could see me but I was trying to explain to him that he was still far away. Add to that it was -3 degrees outside and the last thing I was going to do was venture out in the cold. That kind of defeats the purpose of having a takeaway delivery doesn’t it? Otherwise I would have just taken the car out somewhere! Finally the guys arrived with me standing in the middle of the road freezing my arse off. They apologised for the delay but I was cold enough to freeze water into ice by that stage. I’ll definitely try a different place next time. Zulfi’s is a place to avoid! I award them a lowly score of 1 out of 10.

The builders were round creating a mess the other day so come the evening my flat was covered in dust and my kitchen was reduced to the size of a shoebox. Dinner time came round (not Yorkshire dinner which means lunch) and I couldn’t cook. Outside was snowing and icy, so restaurants were out of the question too. As a result I did the decent thing and looked for a takeaway that delivered. From the myvouchercodes.co.uk website I saw an introductory 10% off offer for hungryhouse.co.uk. The deal was simple, for your first order you get 10% off. Great news!

I registered an account and it found all the takeaways that would deliver to my flat. The list could then be filtered by cuisine type. The choice was large and all places accepted credit & debit card and free delivery over £6. Each takeaway has a rating for quality, service and value. Comments can be added additionally on top so that other potential customers can make a more informed decision.

All the menus were online and you simply clicked on dishes that took your fancy and it was in your shopping basket, much like online grocery shopping. 2 emails are then sent to confirm that you have ordered and then the other to confirm that the takeaway has received your order. You can also track your order much like a parcel with the status changing as your order progresses. After your order is complete they email to ask you to rate the takeaway for quality, service and value with an additional comment if you feel like it.

To add to the service, hungryhouse are also active in ending hunger in the UK and worldwide through it’s support of the ‘end child hunger’ online petition and also they also donate 10p for every £15 spent to ‘Action against hunger’.

Shane Lake and Tony Charles own the company and were on the telly on Dragons Den trying to get £100k to take hungryhouse nationwide. They won the backing of James Caan and Duncan Bannatyne for 50% of the company but things didn’t work out and hungryhouse.co.uk ended up being financed by Bryan O’Connell and Andrew Fuller at the tune of £150k for a much smaller stake. They have spent a lot of that money on PR and google adwords beating established companies to keywords like ‘takeaway’ under sponsored searches. They make their money by charging the takeaways a fee for every order taken. On Dragon’s Den this was pitched at 9% of the order but this may be different now.

I think the website could be formatted a lot better and looks a little on the cheap side and unappetising, even simple nice food pics on the site would probably make a huge difference in making the site look like a food website. The advantage of having the simple interface is the ease of use and speed of page loads. Although the selection of takeaways is vast at over 800 takeaways in the UK, there could be a lot more. There are too many low end takeaways who specialise in nothing and sell everything. All the takeaways appear to sell pizza, chicken, kebabs and curry. There are a few outlets who buck the trend but these are few and far between. They could do with extending the selection to decent restaurants who also deliver.

They allow people to rate and comment and even remind you with emails to do so after an order but annoyingly they don’t allow customers to order their selection of takeaways by any form of rating, making you trawl through all the poorly rated places. I had a problem with my myvouchercodes first order not posting through my order with the 10% discount so I complained using the online complaint form under help>contact us. The next day I got a call from a mobile/cell number and it was Graeme from hungryhouse who apologised for the inconvenience and immediately credited my account with £4. He was a nice chap and I felt that under the coldness of an indiscreet website were some jolly nice people running the business behind it.

As it is a new company and it is still expanding rapidly I will give the service the benefit of the doubt that it will add more decent takeaways in the future and sort out the web design. Even without the personal phone call from Graeme and the free money I was already impressed with the ease of ordering and I will definitely be using their service again in the near future. For that I give hungryhouse.co.uk 8/10

Having contacted hungryhouse.co.uk with the results Graeme sent me an email with the following quote “What would we need to do to move from an 8 to a 9 or 10?! If you have any ideas, please do let us know as we’re always working on the website looking for new ideas to make the service better.” So if you have nay further ideas then post them here or email them directly at help@hungryhouse.co.uk