A Notion restaurant list template, built to last more than a month.

The one idea

Why two databases beat one big table.

A restaurant and a visit are different things. Joe’s Pizza is one place; the slice after a show, the Sunday with your cousins and the 1 a.m. emergency are three visits. Put them in one table and you either overwrite last time or copy the restaurant’s details onto every row.

Split them and Notion does the bookkeeping. Each visit links to its restaurant, and the restaurant page counts its visits, shows the latest date and averages your stars — no formulas to drag down a column.

Database 1

Restaurants: one page per place.

Status suits this well: Notion groups Status options into to-do, in progress and complete, which maps neatly onto want to go, booked and been. Keep “Regular” in the complete group too.

Database 2

Visits: one page per meal.

Two choices people get wrong: make Stars a Number, not a Select, or Notion can’t average it; and make With a Multi-select, not a Person property — Person is for members of your Notion workspace, and your aunt isn’t one.

Build it

Set it up in fifteen minutes.

1. Make two databasesOn a new page, add a database called Restaurants and another called Visits. Give each the properties in the tables above.
2. Link them both waysIn Restaurants, add a Relation property to Visits and turn on “Show on Visits”. Each visit now has a Restaurant field, and each restaurant lists its visits.
3. Add the rollupsIn Restaurants, add three Rollups through the Visits relation: Count all (Times been), Latest date on Date (Last visit) and Average on Stars (Avg stars).
4. Add a “days since” formulaOptional: a Formula property with dateBetween(now(), prop("Last visit"), "days") shows how long it has been. Sort by it to find old favorites you’ve neglected.
5. Fill Location with real placesSearch each restaurant by name or address in the Place property. If you convert an old text column of addresses, Notion warns you may need to tidy them before pins appear.
6. Create the viewsAdd the views in the next section. On your phone, open the Visits gallery to add a meal.

Views

Six views that make it feel like an app.

• Map (Restaurants) — every place with a Location as a pin; tap one to open its page. Notion shows up to 100 pins at once, and if you have two Place properties, pick the right one under Layout → Map by.
• Board by Status (Restaurants) — Want to go, Booked, Been, Regular as columns. Drag a card when you finally go.
• Want to go in one city (Restaurants, List) — filter Status is Want to go and City is London. Your trip list, ready.
• Regulars (Restaurants, Table) — filter Times been is 3 or more, sort by Last visit.
• Gallery (Visits) — cards showing the Photo property. This is the view that makes it look like a food diary.
• Calendar (Visits) — by Date, so “what did we do for Mom’s birthday last year?” is one tap.

Filled in

What a few rows look like.

Honest part

When Notion is enough — and when it isn’t.

Notion is enough if you plan more than you remember: trip lists, a shared “where next” board with a partner, custom properties like “dog-friendly patio” or “good for a work lunch”. Nothing beats it for sorting, filtering and sharing a want-to-go list.

It struggles at the table. Adding a visit means opening the page, picking the restaurant, typing the dishes and uploading a photo — in a dark room, with food going cold. Most databases fall behind there, then stop. Photos are one attachment per visit, not one per dish.

A photo-first diary wins on the been side. In PlateDiary, one photo of the table does most of the Visits database for you: the date and place come from the photo, every dish and drink is cut out into its own save, and the meal becomes a moment. Its place pages are your rollups — your usual, every dish there with a count, every visit. Its Stamps are the Restaurants database, as a stamp book of the restaurants you’ve been to, each with its own page. It has fixed fields, not custom ones, and no want-to-go list, so plenty of people keep Notion for planning and PlateDiary for remembering.

We make PlateDiary, so weigh that in. Notion features on this page come from Notion’s own help pages as they read on 31 October 2026.