Lists: the places you keep meaning to try

Everybody has a mental list of places they keep meaning to try, and everybody loses it.

Somebody mentions somewhere at a dinner, you think I must go there, and then three months later you are standing on a street trying to remember the name. The list exists; it is just scattered across screenshots, a note on your phone and a WhatsApp message from March.

What a list is

Somewhere to put them. A list is a set of places with a name you chose.

Useful ones, in practice:

• Want to try — the default, and the one that gets the most use
• When people visit — the three places you always end up taking people
• Near work — so lunch is not a daily decision
• A trip — everywhere you ate in a city, which is the best souvenir of a holiday there is

The list that is just "here"

The most-used list most people have is the least interesting one: somewhere near me, that I will go to again.

It is worth making anyway. The alternative is re-deciding every week from scratch, which is how everybody ends up in the same two places out of tiredness rather than preference. Ten places you already know are good, in one list, is a Tuesday-evening decision that takes four seconds instead of fifteen minutes of scrolling.

Notes are the part people underuse

You can add a note to any place on a list, and it is worth doing.

"Go before seven or you will queue." "Get the special, not the menu." "Sit upstairs." That is the information you will absolutely not remember in four months, and it is the part that makes a list better than a bookmark.

The trip list

The one people are most surprised by is a list for somewhere you are going.

Before a trip it is a place to put everything you have been told about — the thing a colleague mentioned, the bakery from a video, the place your sister went in 2019. During it, it is a map. Afterwards it is the only decent record of what you ate, which is otherwise a thing that vanishes entirely about a fortnight after you get home.

It is also the single most useful thing to share. Somebody going to the same city next month would rather have your eleven places than any guide.

Private by default, shared when you want

A list is yours unless you share it.

When you do share one, it opens for anybody with the link — no account needed to look. That makes it a genuinely good answer to "where should we eat", which is a question nobody has ever answered well in a group chat.

Lists you build together

You can invite people to add to a list.

Six people, one list, everybody adds two places, and the argument is over in a minute instead of a week. It also works well for a trip: everybody adds what they have heard about, and you end up with a shared map before you have left.

Lists other people have shared

The best recommendation has always been one person who knows what they are talking about, rather than a ranking.

A shared list is exactly that, in a form you can keep. Somebody who eats out constantly in your city, a friend with strong opinions about coffee, every decent lunch near a particular office — these are worth more than a sorted list of averages, because they come with a point of view.

You can save places from somebody else's list into your own, which is usually what you actually want: two of their eleven, added to the pile you are already working through.

What else to look at

• Ratings — what people who went actually thought
• Dishes — the specific thing to order when you get there
• Reservations — booking the ones that need it
• Food guides — where to eat, written up properly