Which app remembers the restaurants you’ve been to? A three-question test.

The test

Three questions, one Saturday night.

Picture a dinner from last spring: a London curry house with Ellie and Sam, the lamb chops everyone still talks about, and a name nobody can remember. Each app below gets the same three questions about that night. “Yes” means the app keeps it; “if you add it” means it has a place for it but you type it in; “no” means it has nowhere to put it.

This isn’t a ranking. A different job — finding somewhere new — would give a very different table; for that, see restaurant apps sorted by job.

The results

Seven apps, three questions.

Hands-free

The automatic ones: Google Maps Timeline and Apple Maps.

Google Maps Timeline saves your visits and routes on each signed-in device, so it can answer “where was that?” without you doing anything that night. Google’s help page says it’s off by default, only works if you opt in, isn’t available in Maps on a computer, and keeps data according to your auto-delete setting. If you already lost a place, our guide to finding restaurants you’ve been to walks through Timeline step by step.

Apple Maps Visited Places does the same on iPhone. Once it’s on and you’ve been somewhere, open Maps → Places → Visited Places to search by name, category, address or notes, and filter by date, category or city. You can add a personal note to a visit, add it to your Places, share it or fix a wrong location, and choose how long visits are kept. Apple says Visited Places are end-to-end encrypted and can’t be read by Apple, and that the feature isn’t available in every country or region.

Both are excellent at where. Neither knows the lamb chops.

You save it

The saving apps: Beli, Corner and Mapstr.

All three remember a place the moment you save it. What they remember about the meal depends on what you type that night — which, honestly, is usually nothing.

• Beli keeps ranked lists and maps of everywhere you’ve been and want to try, with tags, notes and favorite dishes, plus a feed of where friends eat. Our side-by-side: Beli alternative.
• Corner is a personalized map with friends: pin places you don’t want to forget, build lists, share TikTok or Instagram links in as pins. Our take: Corner app alternative.
• Mapstr saves places to your own map, sorted with tags, marked “To try” or “Tried”, with notes and photos, and opens offline.

The blank page

A notes app: everything, if you write it.

A single note called “Places” with one line per visit answers all three questions perfectly — for exactly as long as you keep it up. It’s free, private and already on your phone. It just can’t fill anything in for you. If that’s your setup, our Notes app vs a restaurant journal page has a format worth stealing.

Ours

PlateDiary: all three from one photo.

Take one photo of the table when the food lands. Every dish and drink is cut out on your phone into its own save, in about a second, and saves from the same place within about 90 minutes become one moment. The place comes from the photo. Add who you were with as companions — “with Ellie and Sam” — now or on the bus home; every field is optional.

So the three questions answer themselves later. Places lists every restaurant you’ve eaten at; search a dish (“lamb chops”) and see every place you’ve had it. 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. And each person you eat with gets a companion page of every meal you’ve shared.

It doesn’t do everything: there’s no want-to-go list, no friends’ feed and no recommendations, and it can’t know about meals you didn’t photograph — though you can import old food photos, up to 10 at a time, and they keep their place.

Mix and match

Three setups that actually last.

We make PlateDiary, so weigh that in. Every app’s description comes from its own store listing or help page as it read on 31 October 2026. We left out prices and ratings, and each app’s own page wins if anything has changed.

• The zero-effort setup: turn on Google Maps Timeline or Apple Maps Visited Places. You’ll always know where; accept that you won’t know what.
• The social setup: Beli or Corner for places and friends, plus a photo of the table in PlateDiary for the dishes and the people.
• The private setup: Visited Places or Timeline as a safety net, and PlateDiary for everything else — no account, works offline.

Sources

Where the facts come from