Restaurant spreadsheet or restaurant journal app?

Credit first

Why spreadsheets are great.

• Any column you want — price level, noise level, vegetarian options, “good for a first date”.
• Sort and filter — every Thai place in Brooklyn you rated 4+, in two clicks.
• Share and edit together — perfect for a friend group’s “where next” list.
• Notion databases add gallery and map-like views, tags, and linked pages per city.
• Yours forever — export to CSV and it opens anywhere.

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Columns for a restaurant sheet that stays useful.

One row per visit (or per dish), not per restaurant, is the trick. Then a pivot table gives you “visits per place” and “most ordered dish” for free.

The catch

Where spreadsheets get tedious.

• Photos are clumsy — a link or a tiny thumbnail at best.
• Every field is typed by hand: date, place, city, dish.
• Nobody opens a spreadsheet at the table, so rows get added days later — or never.
• A map means exporting, geocoding, importing.
• It looks like work, which is a strange way to remember a great dinner.

For Notion fans

A Notion restaurant database in five properties.

Add a gallery view with a photo as the cover and it starts to look like a food diary. Add a rollup on Places to count visits.

• Visit (title) — “Dim sum with Grandma, Toronto”.
• Date — the day you went.
• Place (relation) — linked to a Places database, so each restaurant collects its visits.
• Dishes (multi-select) — har gow, cheung fun, egg tarts.
• Stars (select) — one to five.

What changes

What an app fills in for you.

In PlateDiary, one photo of the table does most of the columns. Date and place come from the photo; each dish is cut out into its own save, so the photo is the dish column; the night becomes a moment. Stars, dish names, a note and companions are optional, with your past dish names as one-tap chips.

The pivot tables come built in: a place page with your usual and every dish there with a count, a page per companion, a map, and your most-eaten dishes on the You tab. You can make collections too (custom ones are Premium) — think of them as saved filters you can play with.

At a glance

Spreadsheet vs PlateDiary.

Pick yours

Which one should you use?

We make PlateDiary, so weigh that in. This page describes spreadsheets in general; no product claims about Google Sheets or Notion beyond common features.

• Stay with the spreadsheet if… you love custom fields, plan with friends in one shared list, or want CSV you can analyze.
• Try an app if… your sheet keeps falling weeks behind, or you want photos, a map and counts without typing.
• Do both if… you plan in a shared sheet and remember in PlateDiary.