Jakarta is now entering the 8th month of the COVID-19 pandemic, and from the way things stand right now, it’s not getting any better. Our government is imposing on-and-off social restrictions in the city.
People are suggested to stay-at-home and work-from-home, non-essentials industry are recommended to be closed temporarily, and yes, that’s including the restaurants or dessert parlors that you love!
I used to hang out at the mall near my place and explore the restaurants there every weekend last year, and now I can’t. Fun fact, Indonesian people love to flock to restaurants, eating out with their family, friends, or date. It’s a part of our culture. Now, the pandemic has drastically changed our eating out culture.
To cook, or not to cook, that is the question.
When the social restriction regulation is turned on, ‘eating out’ is thrown out the window. We can buy the ingredients, then cook by ourselves, therefore the ‘to _cook’ _option.
The ‘not to cook’ option: buy takeaway food, or even safer, order food online. As a Jakartan who tries his hard not to contribute to new COVID cases in this city, I sometimes order my food online, thanks to the rise of food-delivery tech in Indonesia, _GoFood _or _GrabFood _(similar to Uber Eats)
I found myself keep ordering the same foods from the same restaurants through _GoFood _over and over again. When I craved for chicken, I found myself ordering food from _KFC _and _McDonald _(YES, _McD _serves chicken in Indonesia). When I craved for Soto, I found myself ordering food from Soto Kudus Blok M Tebet, etc.
There are literally thousands of restaurants in Jakarta, and over the course of 8 months of the pandemic, I only ordered from less than 20 restaurants in Jakarta.
Realizing that, and also reading Regita H. Zakia’s “Foods Around Me: Google Maps Data Scraping with Python & Google Colab”, I am attracted to expand what she’s done to a bigger scale.
How many kinds of foods this city has to offer actually? How many restaurants are there that provide my Indonesian favorite foods, Soto, and Rendang? So many questions.
So this time, I am not going to scrape food services industry data from Google, but from Zomato. Why? That’s where Jakartan Foodies place their rating and write their reviews. It’s a credible source for food references.
In order to do so, I am gonna write a Python script with the Selenium library to automate the scraping process through thousand of restaurant pages, then build our dataset with Pandas.
#web-scraping #zomato #selenium #programming #python3