The best apps to remember restaurants, sorted by what you need.

The rules

How we put this together.

• Every app’s description comes from its own App Store, Google Play or website page, checked on 19 October 2026. Sources are at the bottom.
• No prices, no star ratings, no download counts — they change weekly and say little about fit.
• Grouped by job, not ranked. An app that’s great at one job can be wrong for another.
• We make PlateDiary. It appears in one group, the one it’s built for — not at the top of every list.

30-second quiz

Which job are you hiring an app for?

• “Where should we eat on Saturday, and what do my friends think?” → rank with friends.
• “I keep hearing about places and forgetting them.” → a map of places to try.
• “I’m standing on a street in Lisbon and I’m hungry.” → deciding tonight.
• “What was that dish we had in Melbourne?” → remember what you ate.
• “I already write about my days.” → a general journal.
• “Every beer, wine and cocktail I’ve tried.” → drinks.

Best for ranking with friends

Beli: your top restaurants, ranked.

Beli keeps ranked lists and maps of places you’ve been and want to try, with tags, notes and favorite dishes, plus a feed of where friends are eating, a Taste Profile, a Match Score with friends and personalized recommendations. It’s on iPhone and Android, and it’s social by design. If your friends use it, it’s hard to beat for choosing. More in our Beli comparison.

Best for a map of places to try

Mapstr and Google Maps lists.

Mapstr is a map of your own world: save a place in one tap, sort with tags and colors, mark it “To try” or “Tried”, add notes, ratings and photos, and import from Google Maps, CSV or KML. You can follow friends, chefs and magazines, share your map as a link, and open your map offline. It’s on iPhone and Android, with a paid tier called Mapstr Plus.

Google Maps lists are already on most phones: Favorites, Want to go, Starred places and your own lists, each private or shared by link, with notes and collaborators. Lists can be exported through Google Takeout. If you only need a want-to-go pin, start here. See Google Maps lists vs a food diary.

Best for deciding where to eat

Yelp and The Infatuation.

Yelp calls itself a local guide for finding places to eat, shop, drink, explore and relax. You read and write reviews, browse photos, book tables or join a waitlist, and bookmark must-try places into collections. On iPhone and Android.

The Infatuation publishes restaurant reviews and guides from its editors for more than 40 cities, filterable by cuisine and occasion, with a free account to save reviews and make lists.

Best for remembering what you ate

PlateDiary, Yummi and Dishrant.

PlateDiary (ours) starts from one photo of the table: each dish and drink is cut out on your phone into its own save, and saves group into moments by place and time. A board, a map, a page per place (your usual, your menu there) and a page per companion build themselves. No account; capture and browsing work offline; iPhone and Android.

Yummi is a restaurant and food photo diary for iPhone and iPad. It tags photos by time and place, shows them on a calendar or a map, searches by photo, date or place, and lets each post be private or shared with friends you pick. You can follow other food lovers too.

Dishrant keeps meals with dish names, photos and notes, and maps the restaurants you’ve been to. Its App Store page says the developer collects no data. iPhone only.

Best if you already journal

Day One.

Day One is a general journal with photos, video, audio, templates, multiple journals, On This Day, a map of the places you’ve written from, and end-to-end encryption. It runs on iPhone, Android, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and the web. A “Restaurants” journal inside it works well if you like writing. See journaling apps vs a food diary.

Best for drinks

Untappd.

Untappd is a social app for rating and discovering beer, wine and spirits. You check in a drink with a rating, tasting notes, a photo and where you had it, keep a history of every drink, follow friends and earn badges. It’s for people of legal drinking age. Food’s equivalent is on our Untappd for food page.

Quick table

All of them, on one menu.

Our pick, and our bias

Most people need two apps, not one.

The honest setup for most food lovers is one app for before the meal and one for after. A list or map for places you want to try (Google Maps, Mapstr or Beli), and a diary for the meals you actually had. We built PlateDiary for the “after” — the dish, the place, the people, kept in three seconds a meal. If that’s the job you’re hiring for, try it. If it’s the “before”, one of the others is the better fit.

We make PlateDiary, so weigh that in.

Sources

Where the facts come from