Listed on Zomato, the Chandigarh restaurant offers just one dish — Naughty Strawberry — for Rs 999 (representative image).

Image: Twitter

Chandigarh: A Reddit user flagged a restaurant listed on food-based app Zomato, which only had one dish to offer. The price was ridiculously high, and the restaurant canceled the order when a Reddit user tried to keep it. This led netizens to speculate whether the restaurant was linked to the drug trade. It also caught the attention of Zomato who immediately removed “all” that were potentially fraudulent.

Meanwhile, the Reddit post sparked concern among netizens, who came up with alleged conspiracy theories behind listing only one dish on the menu of a random restaurant. The post stated that the restaurant’s physical address appeared to be fake, and that it did not have genuine reviews.

“Seen some strange listings on Zomato in Chandigarh – so-called ‘restaurants’ that serve only one dish, with exorbitant prices. Many have no real reviews, and addresses. Seems fake or non-existent. Could this be money laundering or some other shady business? Has anyone else seen similar patterns in other cities? What is really going on here? Would love to hear ideas!” Read the post.

“I tried to place an order but it was automatically canceled after a while and the restaurant appears to be closed now,” the Reddit user commented on his post.

“A code for something?”

A screenshot of the food order showed a juice called ‘Naughty Strawberry’ priced at Rs 999. The restaurant was Desi Chinese. Reacting to which, one netizen said, “These taste like the juice you put in your vapes. The pricing also looks consistent.”

Another user commented on the thread saying, “True. I know of such an operation in another city, which mainly sells vape pens/cartridges. Price is almost the same, ₹1000 -₹1200 per item.

“Definitely code for something. But definitely not money laundering,” read another comment.

Zomato took action.

Meanwhile, Zomato has assured its customers that investigations have been initiated against such restaurants, which are serving restricted items or serving prohibited items.

As per our policy, all restaurants listed on Zomato must have an FSSAI license and we actively prevent items like alcohol, cigarettes/cigars/vapes from being listed on our platform. However, the restaurants that have been highlighted were the ones we checked out using generic food names like ‘Naughty Strawberry’, ‘Merry Berry’.

“We have further strengthened our fraud checks to identify such cases to avoid such incidents in future,” it added.