Introducing GoodEats: a private restaurant tracker for iPhone

August 25, 2026 · 2 min read

I kept losing restaurants.

A friend recommends a ramen place, someone drops a link in a group chat, I walk past a bakery that looks great — and three weeks later I can remember that a place existed but not its name, where it was, or who told me about it. Notes apps didn’t work. Screenshots definitely didn’t work. Map pins turned into an unlabeled constellation of question marks.

So I built GoodEats: a tracker for restaurants, cafes, and everywhere else you go — like Goodreads, but for places.

How it works

Two shelves. Every place lives on one of two shelves: Been for places you’ve visited, Want to go for places you’re saving. A swipe moves a place from one to the other — that little moment when a recommendation becomes a memory.

Rate it your way. A simple 1–5 stars, plus notes on what you loved. You can rate individual dishes too, so the next time someone asks “what should I get here?” you actually have an answer.

Scan the menu. Point your camera at a menu — or a delivery-app screenshot — and pick out dishes to track. The text recognition runs entirely on your device.

See it on a map. Every saved place, color-coded by shelf, with ratings at a glance. Great for answering “what’s good near here?”

Save from anywhere. Share a place from Apple Maps or Google Maps straight into GoodEats.

The part I care most about

GoodEats has no accounts, no analytics, and no tracking. There is no server that sees your data. Everything lives on your phone and syncs through your own personal iCloud — I couldn’t read your list of favorite restaurants even if I wanted to. You can export everything as JSON at any time, and deleting the app deletes your data.

That’s not a compliance checkbox; it’s the design. A diary of everywhere you eat is exactly the kind of data that shouldn’t sit on someone else’s server.

Coming soon

GoodEats is finishing App Store review now and will be free to download. If you want a note when it’s live — or you have questions, ideas, or a strong opinion about how many stars a taco truck deserves — email me at [email protected].

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