How to keep track of restaurants you want to try

August 25, 2026 · 3 min read

Somebody tells you about a place. A hand-pulled noodle shop, a bakery that sells out by 10am, a taqueria attached to a gas station that’s somehow better than every sit-down place in town. You nod, you say “oh I have to go,” and you mean it.

Three weeks later you remember only that the place existed. Not the name. Not the neighborhood. Not who told you.

If that loop sounds familiar, the problem isn’t your memory — it’s that you don’t have a capture system. Here’s why the usual ones fail, and what works instead.

Why the usual methods fail

Screenshots. The fastest capture there is, and the worst retrieval. A screenshot of an Instagram story or a group-chat message goes into a camera roll with ten thousand other images, unsearchable and unsorted. Screenshots are where restaurant recommendations go to die.

A note called “Restaurants”. Better — at least it’s one list. But a plain text list has no map, no status, and no context. After a year it’s ninety lines long, you can’t remember which places you’ve already been to, and nothing tells you that three of them are within walking distance of where you’re standing right now.

Map pins. Google Maps and Apple Maps both let you save places, and the map view is genuinely useful. But every save looks the same. Want-to-try and been-there-loved-it and been-there-never-again all collapse into one undifferentiated constellation of flags. (More on this in Google Maps saved places: great for directions, bad as a restaurant tracker.)

What a working system needs

Four properties, none optional:

1. Two states. The single most important distinction is want to go versus been. A recommendation is a fundamentally different object from a memory. Any system that doesn’t separate them turns into mush.
2. Capture in under ten seconds. If saving a place means typing a name, an address, and a note, you won’t do it mid-conversation. The system has to accept a share from a maps app or a quick search and fill in the details itself.
3. A map view. “What’s good near here?” is the question you’ll actually ask, and a list can’t answer it.
4. Context. Who recommended it, what to order, which dish someone raved about. The name alone often isn’t enough by the time you finally go.

The habit

The system only works if capture is reflexive. The rule I use: the moment a place is mentioned, it goes on the list — before the conversation moves on. Not later, not “when I get home.” Ten seconds, phone out, saved, done. Anything longer and the moment passes.

Then, when you actually visit, move it from want to go to been and jot one line about how it was. That single line — “get the birria, skip the horchata” — is worth more than any star rating a stranger wrote.

The tool

You can build a rough version of this with any notes app and some discipline. I tried, for years, and the discipline always lost.

That’s why I built GoodEats — an iPhone app with exactly the two shelves described above (“Been” and “Want to go”), a map with color-coded pins, dish-level notes, and a share extension so a place mentioned in Apple Maps or Google Maps lands on your list in two taps. No account, no social feed, no tracking: your list lives on your phone and in your own iCloud, and nowhere else.

Whatever tool you pick, pick one with the four properties above — and start tonight, with the last place someone told you about that you can still remember.

← All posts