GRUBTOK & KORA: CT Resident Launches Tech Platforms for Diners & Restaurant Owners

Wilton's Nitesh Pundra spent two decades in tech and a decade in restaurants. His new projects, GrubTok and Kora, sit right where those two worlds meet.

When Nitesh Pundra was running restaurants in Stamford, marketing was the last thing on his list. Not because he didn't think it mattered — because everything else came first.

“You're dealing with staffing, deliveries, the walk-in, the health inspector, the Friday rush,” he says. “By the time you close, the last thing you're going to do is update your Google listing. It just doesn't happen. It didn't happen for me, and I was a technology guy.”

That gap — between what owners know they should be doing online and what they actually have time for — is the problem he's now working on full time.

Pundra's background is unusual. For more than 20 years he worked in enterprise technology, most recently as an application engineering manager at a global insurance company. For ten of those years he also owned and ran restaurants in Stamford. In 2016 he moved with his family to Wilton and started a food-tech side project that has slowly grown into two.

This summer he left the corporate job — after two decades at the same company — to do it full time.

GrubTok: Three Recommendations Only

The first project, GrubTok, came out of a family vacation habit. Rather than scrolling through apps and reviews, Pundra would ask a local where they ate. The answer was always short, specific, and usually right.

GrubTok turns that into a short-form video series with one rule: each guest recommends three places. Chefs, critics, food writers, and people who grew up in restaurant families share their picks, and that's it.

“Three is the number a friend gives you,” Pundra says. “The internet already shows you everything. That's not the problem. The problem is knowing which three to trust.”

The mission underneath the format is to distribute the power to recommend rather than concentrate it. There are no gatekeepers: no paid placement, no sponsored ranking, and no requirement to be a critic or an influencer. A chef in West Hartford, a food writer in Westport, and someone who grew up in their family's sushi restaurant in Scarsdale each know something the others don't — and each gets the same three slots.

Every pick comes from a real person with a name and a reason. AI is used to organize those recommendations around the restaurant, the dish, and why someone loves it, so trusted picks are easier to find. In newer markets, where GrubTok is still building its contributor base, the platform can surface data-driven picks until more local recommendations come in.

“Whenever we have human recommendations, those come first,” Pundra says. “AI is great at organizing what people say and helping fill gaps in newer markets. But the goal is to make human recommendations easier to discover, not to replace the people making them.”

That independence extends to his other business. A few owners have already asked whether signing up for Kora would help them get featured on GrubTok. The answer is no.

“GrubTok is completely independent from Kora, and it has to stay that way,” Pundra says. “The moment a recommendation can be bought, it's worthless to the diner.”

The format has spread to Westchester, New York City, Chicago, and Houston, with a companion series, Kitchen Table, focused on the stories behind the food, and curated city guides launching this fall.

Restaurants Need Help

As GrubTok grew, something Pundra hadn't planned for started happening. Restaurants that had been featured began asking him for help with everything else — their website, their Google listing, their reviews, whether they needed to be on social media.

The same six issues kept coming up: website, Google, social, search, ads, and reviews. And the quotes they were getting from agencies — often $600 to $1,000 a month — didn't make sense for an independent restaurant.

“I recognized the problem immediately, because I'd had it,” he says. “I just never had the bandwidth to solve it while I was in the kitchen.”

Kora: A Score, Then The Work

That became Kora (askkora.ai), built on a simple premise: a small business shouldn't need an agency budget to be findable. The idea is to show an owner where they stand, do the work for them, and keep it moving — discover, act, grow.

It starts with a free 60-second Online Health Check that any business can run through WhatsApp, the website, or the new Kora app on iOS and Android. The result is a score out of 100, a list of what's hurting the business online, and a look at which nearby competitors are ranking ahead and where.

“Owners usually don't know where they stand until they see a number,” Pundra says. “When an owner sees something like 41 out of 100, with several competitors ahead on the searches that matter, the problem becomes much easier to understand.”

From there, Kora does the work rather than sending a report. It builds or updates the website, fixes the Google Business Profile, writes and posts social content in the owner's voice, responds to reviews, and can run Google and Meta ads — all through a chat window, so an owner can manage it from their phone without sitting down to learn another marketing platform. Website inquiries land in an inbox the owner can answer from that same phone, and a short weekly summary explains what changed and what it did.

Nothing goes out without the owner's say-so. Kora drafts, the owner approves, and there's a person on the other end when something needs a human eye.

Plans start at $49.99 a month, designed for businesses that may not be able to justify several separate vendors or a traditional agency.

Kora was built for restaurants, but it hasn't stayed there. A pizzeria in Mamaroneck signed on, along with operators of Popeyes and Taco John's franchise locations. Then a dentist's office that had been paying an overseas agency several times more. A spa, a landscape design company, and a therapy practice followed.

“A dentist and a taqueria have the same problem,” Pundra says. “Customers are searching, and somebody else is showing up first.”

Two Directions, One Idea

Pundra sees the two projects as halves of the same thing. GrubTok helps diners find the places worth going to. Kora makes sure those places show up when someone goes looking. One is about trust; the other is about visibility. Both start from the same assumption — that good independent businesses lose out to whoever has the bigger marketing budget, and that it doesn't have to work that way.

“There are great small businesses all over Fairfield County that people three miles away have never heard of,” he says. “Not because they're not good — because nobody had time to deal with the online side. That's the part I'm trying to take off their plate.”

Connecticut business owners can run a free Online Health Check at askkora.ai or by messaging Kora on WhatsApp. Find GrubTok at grubtok.com and on Instagram and TikTok.