Hey Restauranteur!!
Last week I watched a reel that made me want to hunt down a customer named Avni personally!!!!!
Yes, I remember her name, coz Jeneva Talwar, Owner & Slave of Café LaDiDa, Goa (her bio’s words, not mine, but relatable), put up a reel calling her out by name, tagged and everything. She really said, I’m naming you, Avni, and the internet can decide for itself.
Here’s what happened.
Avni wanted a gluten-free sandwich. Fine. Then she also wanted vegetables in it, on a menu item that is, by design, a three-cheese sandwich with zero vegetables anywhere near it.
Jeneva’s team called her, explained this gently, the way you’d explain to a toddler why the sky is blue.
Avni was unmoved. Whatever you can do, just do it, she said, on loop, like a broken customization request. So they did their best and sent it off, feeling like reasonably good people.
A few hours later, a complaint shows up on Swiggy.
Attached is a photo of the saddest sandwich you’ve ever seen. White bread, one pale slice of yellow cheese, looking like it lost a fight.
One tiny problem, Avni. Café LaDiDa’s bajra bread is brown. Their sandwich is grilled. Their cheese is never the slice kind. That photo was not even from their kitchen.
Swiggy marked the complaint as genuine anyway.
Jeneva’s line in that reel is the one I cannot stop replaying. Dude, at least get the colours right if you’re going to fake a photo.
I laughed first. Then I stopped, because a cafe owner having to fact-check the exact shade of her own cheese to defend herself is a genuinely unhinged place for a small business to end up.
The colour of a lie
Turns out Avni is not a rare, unlucky one-off.
Deepinder Goyal, the CEO of Zomato, mentioned on Raj Shamani’s podcast that some customers have started using AI tools to manufacture evidence for refunds. Flies and insects added to photos of food that never had any. Cakes that arrived perfectly intact, edited to look smashed and cracked before the complaint even gets typed out.
Zomato apparently noticed a sudden spike in complaints about smashed cakes specifically, which is what sent someone down the rabbit hole in the first place.
A cake being smashed is now a genre of fraud with its own noticeable spike on a dashboard somewhere. That is a pattern, running at scale, with tools that exist purely to make lying look convincing.
Why this works so well on restaurants
These scams do not succeed despite the system.
They succeed because of it.
Swiggy and Zomato are built to protect the customer first.
A complaint comes in with a photo attached, and the refund often gets approved before the restaurant even knows there was a problem.
Restaurants end up guilty until they can somehow prove otherwise, except by the time they hear about it, the money is gone, and the fake photo has already done its job.
Most restaurant owners also don’t push back. Either they assume nothing will change, or they’re wary of looking difficult on a platform that sends them most of their orders. So the complaint just sits there on their profile, quietly doing damage that nobody’s contesting.
And that damage is public.
All of us check reviews before we order. We scroll Swiggy ratings, we peek at Google reviews, and we decide where to eat based on strangers we’ve never met. A restaurant’s reputation is no longer something they control internally. One fake photo, timed right, chips away at it in front of every future customer who was on the fence anyway.
What can restaurants do about this?
You cannot stop someone from lying about your food. But you can absolutely make their lie a lot harder to win.
Photograph every high-risk order
Before it goes out the door, take one photo showing the packed order, the seal, and the order ID together. Ten seconds of effort, and now you have something real to point to instead of just your word against theirs.
Seal it in a way that shows tampering
Something as simple as writing the order number across the packaging seal means any opening in transit becomes visible. It is a small habit that quietly closes off one of the easiest scams in the book.
Keep your kitchen and handover footage
Hold on to CCTV covering the packing area and the delivery pickup point for as long as the platform’s dispute window allows. If a complaint lands, you want footage that shows exactly what happened, not just a strong opinion about what probably happened.
Track every complaint like it is data, because it is
Keep a simple sheet. Order ID, what was claimed, what evidence you have, how it got resolved. One fake complaint looks like bad luck. Five from a similar pattern look like something you can actually take to the platform and demand answers about.
Dispute with facts, not frustration
Skip the accusations, however satisfying they might feel in the moment. Lay out your evidence plainly and ask for a genuine review. Calm and documented beats angry and vague, every single time.
Escalate patterns, not just individual complaints
If this keeps happening, stop treating each complaint as its own little battle. Take the pattern to your account manager as one consolidated case. Platforms tend to move faster when they can see a trend, not just hear one more restaurant venting.
The real fix
None of this stops someone from trying to fake a sandwich photo tomorrow. But it does shift the odds back in your favour, because right now the system rewards whoever shows up with evidence first and fastest, and for far too long that’s only ever been the customer.
Restaurant owners deserve the same shot at being believed.
At the very least, get your colours right, Avni.
Until next week!