Good places deserve to be remembered

Someone asks for a restaurant recommendation. You remember a little place you loved: the table by the window, the dish you’d order again, the friend who took you there. The name takes a moment longer.

Maybe it’s in your saved places. Maybe you sent it to someone. Or maybe you took a photo of the menu and meant to do something with it later.

We’re building TasteBud to give those places a home.

Good food is better with friends. Taste buds, if you will.

TasteBud is still in development. We’re getting it ready for launch, and we’ll share updates here on Tasting Notes as it takes shape.

A home for your places

What if you could curate your own Michelin Guide?

A guide shaped by your taste, filled with places you’ve loved and recommendations from people you trust. Your neighborhood noodle shop could sit alongside the restaurant you save for a special occasion. You get to decide what earns a place, and what makes it worth going back.

You probably already have the beginnings of that guide. A list in your notes app. A collection of pins on a map. Screenshots of recommendations. A group chat full of good suggestions. Each holds a piece of your taste, scattered across places you have to remember to look.

TasteBud is a home for that personal guide, with the context that makes it yours. Who suggested a restaurant? What should you order? Why did you love it? Those details are part of what makes a recommendation useful.

The more you explore and add to it, the more it reflects you. A guide you can turn to when you’re choosing dinner, planning a trip, or answering a friend who asks, “Where should we eat?”

We sweat the details

We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. We’re making the ordinary moments of sharing great food even more joyful. Saving a recommendation before you forget it. Finding a familiar favorite when you’re making plans. Spinning the globe to see where you’ve been. Passing along a place you think someone else would enjoy.

We want those moments to feel easy. That means paying attention to the small decisions: how much information to ask for, which details to show first, and whether a label makes sense without an explanation.

It also means being thoughtful about what to build next. A feature can sound useful on its own and still make the whole app harder to use. Part of the work is figuring out which additions help, and giving the basics enough attention to feel right.

These are our Tasting Notes

This blog is a place to share that work as it takes shape.

We’ll write about what we’re building, the design decisions behind it, and the things we learn along the way. Sometimes a post might be about a new feature. Sometimes it might be about a small interaction that took a few attempts to get right.

We hope that gives you a better sense of the care going into TasteBud, and a way to help shape it. If there’s something you wish were easier about keeping track of restaurants, we’d love to hear about it.

Welcome to Tasting Notes. We’re glad you’re here.

Neil
Founder, TasteBud