How to plan where to eat on a trip (and actually remember it afterward)

September 21, 2026 · 3 min read

Food is half the reason to travel, which is why it’s strange how badly the planning usually goes. It fails at both ends of the trip.

Before: you over-research. Forty browser tabs, three “36 hours in” articles, a borrowed Google Doc from a friend — distilled into nothing you can use on the ground.

After: total amnesia. A year later the whole trip’s eating collapses into “there was this amazing little place…” with no name, no street, no way to send it to a friend heading there next month.

The fix is one list, built before you go, consulted during, and harvested after.

Before: build a shortlist, not a spreadsheet

Cap it at 10–15 places for a week-long trip. More than that isn’t planning, it’s anxiety with formatting. For each entry, capture three things:

1. The place, saved with its real location (share it from your maps app into your tracker, so it lands with an address and pin — not as text in a doc).
2. The dish or reason (“go for the morning pastry,” “book the counter”).
3. The source — the friend, the article, the chef interview. You’ll want to know whose taste to trust when two picks conflict.

Skip the day-by-day meal itinerary. Restaurants close, trains run late, and the best meals are detours. What you want is coverage, not a schedule.

During: let the map decide

This is where the system pays off. You’re done at the museum at 1pm, hungry, somewhere unfamiliar. Open the map view of your list: two of your saved places are within a ten-minute walk. Pick one. Total decision time: ninety seconds, zero re-research, no standing on a corner reading reviews while your travel companion slowly loses faith in you.

The map view is the entire reason the list beats the Google Doc. A doc knows what you wanted; only a map knows what you wanted near here. (More on that gap in our Google Maps piece.)

After: harvest while it’s warm

The last night of the trip, or the flight home — ten minutes, that’s all:

• Move everywhere you actually ate to your “been” shelf.
• Rate each, and write one line per place, naming the dish: “the anchovy toast, absurd.” Dish memory decays fastest and matters most.
• Delete the places you didn’t reach unless you’d genuinely route a future trip around them. A trimmed list stays trustworthy.

Now your trip has a permanent, queryable food record. When a friend heads to the same city, you don’t send “there was this amazing little place” — you send five names with dishes attached, in thirty seconds, and become their favorite person.

The tool

Any system with shelves, a map, and fast capture works. GoodEats happens to be built exactly for this shape of problem: save places from Apple Maps or Google Maps with the share sheet, “Want to go” and “Been” shelves, dish-level ratings, and a color-coded map that works wherever you are. It’s private by design — no account, your data in your own iCloud — and everything exports as JSON, so your Lisbon list is yours forever.

Eat well out there. And write it down before the plane lands.

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