How to plan where to eat on a city trip (without a spreadsheet)
17 July 2026 · 5 min read
There are two failure modes for eating on a trip. Over-planning: a spreadsheet with reservations and a schedule that turns dinner into project management. And under-planning: standing in a tourist zone at 19:30, starving, picking the first place with laminated menus and regretting it before the bread arrives.
The fix for both is the same: separate collecting from deciding. Collect continuously before the trip with zero effort; decide on the ground with a map. Here’s the system.
Collect for weeks, not the night before
The best restaurant tips don’t show up when you sit down to “research.” They show up randomly — a reel in February, a friend’s story in April, a TikTok the week you booked. If your system only works in a dedicated planning session, you lose all of them.
So make saving reflexive: the moment a place for your destination crosses your feed, save it to one fixed home — a Google Maps list or a food map app like Korka (where sharing the post is the whole job, and the venue gets identified and pinned automatically). The rule is one home for every tip. Tips split across Notes, screenshots, and DMs are tips you’ll never see again.
Aim for 10–15 spots, deliberately too many
For a weekend trip you’ll eat maybe six meals, so save double that. Extra pins are options, not obligations — the goal is that wherever you happen to be standing, something you pre-vetted is within a ten-minute walk. A mix helps: a couple of “worth crossing town for” places, and a bench of casual spots, bakeries, and bars filling the gaps between sights.
Book the one or two that need it, wing the rest
Scan your saves and be honest about which places actually require a reservation — usually one or two. Book those, and leave every other meal unscheduled. A trip where every meal is booked is a commute with food at the ends of it.
On the ground, decide by proximity
This is where the map earns its keep. Museum done, feet tired, hungry: open the map, see your pins, walk to the nearest one. No re-googling, no “let me find that reel,” no committee. If you saved opening hours with the pin (Korka pulls them in automatically, and can filter to what’s open right now), you also skip the classic heartbreak of walking fifteen minutes to a closed door.
A nice side effect of proximity alerts: walk past a spot you saved months ago and your phone quietly tells you. Some of the best meals of a trip are the ones your past self planned and your present self forgot about.
After the trip, keep the map
Don’t delete the list when you fly home. Mark what you actually visited, and the map becomes two things: the answer when a friend asks “where should I eat in Lisbon?” — in Korka you can send your whole city map with a six-digit code — and a head start for the return trip. Food lists compound. The spreadsheet you’d have made gets deleted; the map keeps paying out for years.
Put your saved spots on a map.
Korka turns Instagram and TikTok food saves into a personal restaurant map. Share from your feed — one tap. Free to start.
