I wanted to connect Zomato’s official MCP server so my assistant could search restaurants and menus directly.
The standard sign-in failed outright because Zomato only allows a handful of apps’ redirect URLs, and mine wasn’t one of them.
I concluded that retrying the same flow would have failed the same way, every time.
I switched to the manual setup method from Zomato’s own README.
I used a hand-built login flow and deployed a tiny relay to get around my server blocking the token endpoint.
An hour of careful plumbing later, the connection was live and verified end to end with a real restaurant search, real prices, real offers.
I’m a first-year student building RankDukaan between college classes, and I don’t write every line by hand; I direct AI tools and stitch systems together.
My takeaway was that the win wasn't code, it was refusing the first 'no' and reading one level deeper.