How to keep a food journal, for meals you’ll want to remember.

First

Decide what your food journal is for.

“Food journal” means three different things, and mixing them up is why so many people quit. Pick one before you write a word:

• A memory journal — the meals out you want to remember: the place, the dish, the people, the night. This guide is about this one.
• A health food diary — every bite, with times and how you felt afterwards, usually for a doctor or a specialist. If someone has asked you to keep one, use the sheet they give you; it is built for what they need to see.
• A cooking notebook — what you made at home and how to make it again. Useful, but a different book.

What to write

The four things that matter, and the extras that don’t.

A good entry answers the questions future-you will actually ask: what was that dish, where was it, who was I with, and was it worth going back? Everything else is a bonus.

• The dish. Its name as the menu wrote it, or your own name for it (“the green curry that made Theo cry”). A photo counts.
• The place. Name and neighbourhood. Six months from now “that ramen place near the station” will not be enough.
• Who you were with. First names are fine. This is the part people treasure most later and almost never write down.
• One line. Why it mattered: the crackling, the view, the argument about dessert, the waiter who remembered you.
• Optional extras: stars, what it came to, what you would order next time, the weather, the song that was playing.

Example entries

What a good entry looks like.

Short beats thorough. Each of these took under a minute, and each one brings the whole night back:

• Fri 7 March · Dishoom, King’s Cross · with Priya and Sam. Black daal and bacon naan roll. Queued 40 minutes in the rain and didn’t mind. Order the daal again; skip the lassi.
• Sun 23 March · the dumpling place on Elizabeth St · solo. Pork and chive, pan-fried. Read a whole chapter at the counter. 4 stars — the chilli oil is the reason to come.
• Sat 5 April · Lena’s birthday, rooftop taquería. Al pastor tacos, two rounds. Lena made us all try the mezcal. Too loud to talk, perfect anyway.
• Wed 16 April · work lunch, Vietnamese canteen. Bún chả. Kenji showed me how to dunk properly. The usual from now on.

Paper or phone

Paper, a notes app, a spreadsheet, or a food journal app?

There is no wrong format — only the one you will still be using in a year. Here is how they compare for meals out:

Keep it up

Make it take three seconds on the night.

The trick is to split the work: capture at the table, write later — or never. A system that survives a busy week looks like this:

1. Take one photo of the whole tableBefore anyone digs in. One wide shot keeps every dish, the plates and the hands reaching in.
2. Stop there if the night is busyThe photo already carries the date and usually the place. That alone is a usable entry.
3. Add the four things on the way homeOn the bus, in the taxi, in bed: dish, place, people, one line. Two minutes, tops.
4. Fill gaps on SundayOnce a week, scroll back and name anything you skipped while you still remember it.

Look back

Read it back once a month.

A journal pays you back when you reread it. At the end of each month, flip through and answer three questions: What was the dish of the month? Where did I go back to? Who did I eat with most? At the end of the year, pick a top five and the meal you would relive first.

Those answers turn into great things to share: a birthday message to the friend you ate with most, a list of places to take visitors, a reason to go back somewhere you forgot you loved.

The shortcut

The three-second version: PlateDiary.

We make PlateDiary, a food journal built exactly around the method above. You snap one photo of the table and every dish is cut out into its own save on your phone, in about a second. Saves group themselves into a moment by place and time, so the place and date are filled in for you.

Names, stars, notes and companions are all optional, and your past dish names come back as one-tap chips — so it can count “eaten 3×” for you. Once a month is over, it becomes a story you can flip through. It works offline and needs no account.