Is there a Goodreads for food? Yes, if you think in shelves.

The original

What Goodreads actually does.

On its App Store listing, Goodreads lets you put a book on a Want to Read, Currently Reading, Read or Did Not Finish shelf, and make your own lists. You rate books with half, quarter or whole stars, write reviews, follow friends to see what they’re reading, get recommendations from what you’ve rated highly, join a yearly Reading Challenge, and get a Year in Books recap of everything you read.

Notice how little of that is about discovering books. Most of it is about keeping them: where a book sits in your life, what you thought, and how your year looked. That’s the part food people mean when they search “Goodreads for restaurants”. (For the film version of the same wish, see Letterboxd for food; this page is about shelves.)

Books → food

Every Goodreads shelf, translated to restaurants.

The catch

Why a restaurant shelf is harder than a book shelf.

• You re-read restaurants. Nobody reads the same novel eleven times; you go to your local Thai place every other Friday. A “Read” checkbox loses all of that.
• The dish matters more than the place. The curry house in Tooting is “Read”, but the lamb chops are the five-star part and the biryani is a three.
• Places change. A book’s text never changes; a kitchen changes chefs. Your shelf needs dates.
• The company is half of it. Nobody remembers who they read a book with. Everyone remembers who was at the birthday dinner.

Copy this

Five food shelves worth keeping.

Set these up anywhere — a notes app, a sheet, a notebook. They work because each one answers a question you actually ask.

• Want to go — every rumor, with who recommended it (“Hannah: the dumplings in Flushing”).
• Been — one line per visit: date, place, the dish, a few stars.
• Regulars — anywhere you’ve been three times or more, with your usual.
• Special occasions — the omakase counter, the tasting menu, the place you’d book for a parent’s birthday.
• Not again — Goodreads’ Did Not Finish, for food. Keep it short and kind; future you just needs the warning.

The setup

The two-app version of Goodreads for food.

The want to go shelf is a solved problem: Google Maps lists, Beli, Mapstr and Corner all hold places you mean to try, and most of them let friends add to it. The been shelf is where people give up, because it needs filling in every time you eat out — usually when the food is hot and nobody wants to type.

That’s the shelf PlateDiary keeps. Take one photo of the table and each dish and drink is cut out on your phone into its own save, in about a second, filed under the place and the night. Stars, a note, tags and companions are optional and can wait. Your own past dish names come back as one-tap chips, so you’ll see “eaten 4×” on the dish you always order.

Stamps is PlateDiary’s stamp book of the restaurants you’ve been to, and each one gets its own page: your visits, your usual, the dishes you’ve had there and who came with you. A café, bakery, bar, stall or shop counts too. You add the stamp after the meal, never at the table.

The shelf Goodreads never needed

Regulars, counted for you.

Stamps sort by most visited, latest or A–Z. Once the book fills up, the one you visit most is shown as “Your regular”, and the book counts how many you’ve tried only once. Each restaurant’s page shows your visits by year, your usual, and the dish list you’ve built up there — so the Melbourne brunch spot you’ve hit nine times reads like a shelf of its own.

At the end of a month or a year, Served turns your saves into a story: dish of the month, your regular and new places, who you ate with. Think Year in Books, for the table.

Honest gaps

What PlateDiary doesn’t do from the Goodreads list.

We make PlateDiary, so weigh that in. Goodreads facts come from its App Store listing, and the other apps’ from their own listings and help pages, as they read on 31 October 2026.

• No want-to-go shelf. It only holds meals you’ve had. Keep places to try in a maps app.
• No friends’ feed or followers. Companions are names on a night, and nothing is shared with them.
• No recommendations from strangers. It only knows what you’ve eaten.
• No public reviews. Your stars and notes are for you. To show a night off, you export it as a picture.

Sources

Where the facts come from