Dear restaurants, we miss trusting you blindly

Opening Zomato or Swiggy used to make me hungry. Now it makes me anxious.Every evening starts the same way. I scroll through restaurants, decide what I want, and then spend the next ten minutes wondering if I’ve seen the place — or the cuisine — in a headline recently.

Hyderabad didn’t make me fall out of love with food. It simply made me suspicious of it. When every other week another café, restaurant or food outlet - big or small, famous or tucked away in a lane - is making headlines after food safety raids, it’s hard not to be. After enough stories about expired ingredients, fake food items and the occasional cockroach making an appearance where it absolutely shouldn’t, my brain now reads headlines before it reads menus.I moved here from Mumbai excited to eat my way through the city. Biryani, vadas, bajjis, cafés hidden inside lanes I’d never find again — my Google Maps and Instagram Saves have more restaurants than tourist spots. I genuinely love trying new food. I just didn’t expect ordering dinner to become a trust exercise.At this point, I’m not choosing dinner. I’m conducting background verification.The other day, I realised I’d spent twenty minutes reading reviews for a fried rice combo that I would’ve finished in eight.

Somewhere between “Must try!” and “Packaging was good,” I’m mentally checking whether I’ve seen the place in a headline recently. It gets worse. A few weeks ago, I happily ordered groceries online. Everything arrived. Life went on. Then, a few days later, that warehouse was all over the news. Brilliant.

Apparently, my groceries made headlines faster than they were delivered. I’ve eaten my way through other cities without this level of emotional commitment. The only food I’ve ever been suspicious of is pani puri. Hyderabad has somehow expanded that list. I like cooking. I just don’t have the time. So ordering in is less of a luxury and more of a survival skill. Unfortunately, my bank balance is already best friends with zero, and now my appetite has developed trust issues too. Honestly, if this continues, one day you’ll find me happily eating plain curd rice, whispering to myself, “At least nobody ever made headlines for this... right?” Until then, I’ll be doing what I do every evening: opening a food delivery app, getting hungry, getting suspicious, and quietly closing the app.– This rant comes from adventurous eater Shreya Varanasi, who now conducts a background check before placing a food order