Keep Track of Every Place You Have Eaten

The simplest way to keep track of every place you have eaten is to rate each one when you leave. In Mosey a rating saves the place, the dishes and your stars, and your highest-rated places gather in a permanent list called Top Rated that you can hand to a friend.

Why keep track of every place you have eaten?

Memory is a poor record for food. You remember the meal that was wonderful and the one that went wrong, and you lose the large middle: the good lunch near the airport, the neighborhood place a colleague took you to, the brunch you meant to repeat. Six months on, someone asks for a recommendation and you can only say it was somewhere near the river.

A running record fixes that, and it has a second use. Looking back across a year shows what you actually like, which is often different from what you think you like. Some people find they keep returning to the same two cuisines. Others see a pattern in the places they rated highest, and use it to choose where to travel next.

How do you rate a place so you remember it?

Do it while the meal is still in your head. The rating form needs only a place and stars, so it takes less than a minute. Optional extras make it a better memory: name the dishes and rate each one, add a photo, and write a line in your own words. If you would rather finish later, "Keep this rating for later" holds what you have added on your phone for a while.

Ratings are one per visit. If you return to a place soon after, the app offers to update the earlier rating instead of adding a second. That keeps your record honest, because it shows the place as you judge it now rather than as a pile of duplicates. Whatever you post becomes visible to anyone looking at that place, so write it as you would to a friend.

What is the permanent Top Rated list?

In the lists section you will find two lists that are always there. Top Rated is described in the app as your highest-rated places, a permanent list that is always there. My Favorites is separate, and holds the places you saved. You never have to create or maintain either, and neither can be deleted, which is exactly why they work as a record.

A permanent list also means a place cannot slip off the edge. Even if you stop adding to your own lists, your best meals are collected without effort. When a friend asks where to go, you open Top Rated, pick three, and send them. You can also share a list of your favorites with another person, which is quicker than typing out names from memory.

How can tags make your restaurants-I-have-been-to record searchable?

Tags are the cheap way to add structure. When you rate a place, tag it with what it was for: Date Night, Family Friendly, Solo Dining, Business Lunch, Hidden Gem, or a cuisine such as Italian or Tacos. The tags are yours, a note about the visit and never a claim about the place. Later, they let you and others pick out the kind of place you want.

Tags also feed badges. Rate five different places of one kind and your ratings of that kind begin to carry the badge, then more at ten, twenty and fifty. Nothing is bought or ranked; the badges only count places you have actually rated. Think of them as a quiet progress bar on your habit of paying attention to what you eat. Because the count is by different places, going back to the same favorite ten times adds one, which nudges you toward trying something new.

How should you organize a food memory list?

Use lists for the stories your ratings do not tell. Make one for a trip, one for a season, one for a city you lived in. Add places you rated, then add the ones you only walked past. Sections let you group by day or by neighborhood, notes record what you would order again, and a cover is made from the photos of the places, so the list looks like the trip it is.

Review the lists once in a while. Remove places that disappointed you, or leave them with a note so you do not return by accident. Anything you keep is useful to someone else too: a public list can be liked and saved by others, and a private one stays between you and the people you invite. Choose each list's privacy when you make it, and change it any time if you are the owner.

How a record of your meals helps local places

A good rating is worth more to a small place than any advertisement, and giving one costs you thirty seconds. Mosey is free for a place to list, has no hidden fees and keeps its tools affordable, which means the attention your ratings create supports local places directly. Keeping track of where you eat is one of the easiest ways to put your habits behind the places you want to stay open.

If you want help deciding where to begin, read how to find good food in a new city, then see how ratings work on the app's ratings page.

Browse the US food guides for places worth adding, read about eating alone at a restaurant and moving to a new city for two common reasons to start a record, and read how to plan a food crawl with friends for a way to log a whole afternoon.

Get the Mosey app, rate the last place you ate, and let your Top Rated list start filling itself.