Looking for app/website to keep restaurant lists.

December 8, 2013 9:44 AM

I'm looking for an app/web site to track restaurants where I want to eat. Requirements: Keeps a list of restaurants where I'd like to eat. Allows me to move them to "liked it" (so I'll remember to eat there again) or "didn't like it" (so I won't) lists after I've eaten there. Needs to have some sort of mapping function so if we're in the neighborhood and hungry, I can say "Oh, hey, we've been meaning to eat at [x, y, z] places. Which would you like to try?"

Don't care about: Writing reviews, check-in badges (other than to list places that I've been to and move them from "to try" to the liked/disliked list), posting to Twitter/Facebook.

Platforms: Mac & iPad at home, iPhone on the move.

Looking at: Yelp - has "to try" and "to review" tags but I'm not clear on its list functionality other than that.

Aware of: Urbanspoon, Foursquare, and Google Places, but have not looked closely at any. Also aware of a lot of general list software, but lists won't have the map function.

posted by immlass to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Best answer: Foursquare does all of the things that you want. You can create lists, track where you've been, log places that you like and dislike, and it will tell you based on your current location or a specified location what places on your list are nearby.
posted by telegraph at 9:46 AM on December 8, 2013 [1 favorite]

You may want to try https://trello.com. It's an easy to use tool that let's you create lists and add items to them. It's meant for project management but they could be for anything. There are also native apps that run on all the major phone & tablet platforms.

Oh, just noticed the map requirements. Trello may fall short there.
posted by askmehow at 10:17 AM on December 8, 2013

Seconding FourSquare. I use it for something very similar to what you describe.
posted by Superplin at 10:23 AM on December 8, 2013

I use urbanspoon for this function exactly.
posted by argyle dreams at 10:30 AM on December 8, 2013

Best answer: Ness does this to a tee and the iPhone app is simple and easy to use.
posted by thirdletter at 10:56 AM on December 8, 2013

Personally, I just use Evernote for this. I have a notebook called "restaurants" and I use tags for rating them ("great", "good", "fair", etc.). I put pictures into the notes themselves, along with text notes about whatever might be useful to mention about the restaurant (like which dish I particularly liked), and use the URL field to link to the web page of the restaurant (if the restaurant has one). One thing you could also do, but I haven't been doing, is add geo locations to the notes; Evernote has a map feature that lets you display notes based on a location and I can envision filtering restaurant notes by locations and displaying them in Evernote's map view.
posted by StrawberryPie at 1:00 PM on December 8, 2013

I use Pinterest for this. I have a "Restaurants to Try" board and a "Restaurants, Tried & and True." When I try a restaurant on the first list, I just edit the pin to move it to the second list, and add a few comments about the experience.

Pinterest very recently introduced a mapping function, but I haven't tried it.
posted by merejane at 2:00 PM on December 8, 2013

I do just this with urbanspoon
posted by kbuxton at 5:03 PM on December 8, 2013

Response by poster: Update: I am using Foursquare very successfully to do this now. Also Ness is good at suggesting places already and I've only trained it a little, so it gets a best answer as well. (My husband is currently grumping technically about Urbanspoon's randomizer so he ruled it out, but it may work perfectly for others.) Thanks for the help, and I am now eating happily from my list of places I wanted to try!
posted by immlass at 1:30 PM on December 11, 2013