Restaurant Tracker Spreadsheet: The Free Google Sheets Template
To track restaurants in Google Sheets, give each place one row with eleven columns (date, place, city, area, cuisine, dish, rating, price, status, would-return and notes), put dropdowns on city, cuisine and status, and add four formulas on a summary tab. The full template is below and free, and it is built for diners keeping their own list of places they have been and places they want to try, not for restaurant owners tracking sales.
Reaching for a spreadsheet is the right instinct. A Google Sheets restaurant tracker costs nothing, opens on every device you own, exports to CSV forever, and does exactly what you tell it, which is more than most apps can say. If you want a column for who recommended the place, or the exact price of the tasting menu, or a flag for whether the bathroom was clean, nobody is going to stop you.
So here is the template, in full, for free: the columns worth having, four formulas that turn a list into something you can actually query, and two settings that stop it rotting by entry forty. Then the honest part: the specific point at which a spreadsheet stops being the right shape for this, which is not the point most articles claim. If you are weighing the wider decision first, our guide on how to keep track of restaurants covers method before tooling, and the Notion version of this build is its own page. If your list currently lives in Google Maps, export your saved places to CSV first and paste them in.
What columns should a restaurant tracker spreadsheet have?
Almost every restaurant spreadsheet dies the same death: nineteen columns on day one, so logging a dinner feels like filing an expense claim, and the habit is gone by February. The set below is the pruned version. Every column exists because you will genuinely ask that question later: where was that ramen place?, what did we order?, would we go back?
- A: Date. Format the whole column as a date, not text. Everything else that sorts usefully depends on this being a real date value.
- B: Place. The name exactly as you would search for it. Resist adding the branch or the street here; that is what column C is for.
- C: City. Use a dropdown, not free text, or you will end up with Amsterdam, amsterdam and Adam as three separate cities and every formula below will quietly under-count.
- D: Area. Neighbourhood or district. This is the closest a spreadsheet gets to a map, and it is the column you will filter by most if you mostly eat in one city.
- E: Cuisine. Dropdown, ten to fifteen options, no more. "Japanese" beats maintaining Ramen, Sushi and Izakaya as separate tags you will never filter on.
- F: Dish. The single most valuable column in the sheet and the one people leave out. A year later, "the lamb skewers, skip the dumplings" is worth more than any score.
- G: Rating. A number, 0–5, one decimal. Pick a scale on day one and never change it: a sheet with three years of 1–10 scores and one year of 1–5 is a sheet you cannot sort.
- H: Price. What it actually cost per head. Numeric, no currency symbol in the cell; format the column as currency instead so it stays a number you can average.
- I: Status. Dropdown: Been / Want to go. This one column is your archive and your wishlist at the same time, and it is what makes the whole thing work.
- J: Again? A checkbox. Brutally simple, and in practice the fastest filter you own for "where are we going tonight?".
- K: Notes. Everything that fits nowhere else: who you were with, book-ahead warnings, the fact that the terrace is the only part worth sitting on.
| Column | Field | Cell type | Must fill in? |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | Date | Date | Yes |
| B | Place | Text | Yes |
| C | City | Dropdown | Yes |
| D | Area | Text | No |
| E | Cuisine | Dropdown | No |
| F | Dish | Text | No |
| G | Rating | Number, 0–5, one decimal | No |
| H | Price | Number, formatted as currency | No |
| I | Status | Dropdown: Been / Want to go | Yes |
| J | Again? | Checkbox | No |
| K | Notes | Text | No |
Eleven columns, and only four of them (date, place, city, status) are ones you must fill in for the sheet to stay coherent. That ratio is the whole design. A tracker you fill in half of is a tracker; a tracker you fill in none of is a tab you never open.
Which formulas turn a restaurant list into a tracker?
A list you scroll is not a tracker. These four are the difference, and together they take about five minutes to set up. Put them on a second tab called Summary so they are not fighting your data for space.
1. Your average score for a place you have been to more than once. Put this in a spare column next to the row:
=AVERAGE(FILTER($G$2:$G, $B$2:$B=B2))
2. How long your wishlist actually is. The number that decides whether you need to go out more or save less:
=COUNTIF($I$2:$I, "Want to go")
3. Every city you have eaten in, deduplicated and sorted. This is your passport page, and it updates itself:
=SORT(UNIQUE(FILTER($C$2:$C, $C$2:$C<>"")))
4. Your genuine top ten, best first, wishlist entries excluded so unvisited places cannot rank:
=SORT(FILTER($B$2:$G, $I$2:$I="Been"), 6, FALSE)
One more that is worth the thirty seconds, because it is the only thing that gets a spreadsheet close to being useful while you are standing on a street. It builds a working Maps link from the name and city you already typed:
=HYPERLINK("https://www.google.com/maps/search/?api=1&query="&ENCODEURL(B2&" "&C2), "map")
Two settings that stop it rotting
Formulas are the fun part; these two are the reason the sheet still works in a year. Both take under a minute.
- Data validation on C, E and I. Select the column, then Data → Data validation → Dropdown. This is the single highest-value thirty seconds in the whole build. Free-text categories degrade (always, without exception) and every formula above silently returns the wrong number when they do. A dropdown makes the bad input impossible instead of asking you to be careful forever.
- A conditional-format colour scale on G. Format → Conditional formatting → Colour scale, red through green across 0 to 5. It sounds cosmetic. It is not: it is the only thing in a spreadsheet that lets you find your good places by looking rather than by sorting, and looking is what you actually do.
What does a spreadsheet do better than an app?
Plenty of articles in this format are a thinly disguised advert. So, straight: there are things the sheet wins at outright, and they are not small.
- You own it, completely. Download as CSV, keep it forever, open it in anything. No app can be shut down, acquired, or repriced out from under this file. That is a real form of safety and most tracking apps cannot offer it.
- Any column you can imagine. Wine pairing, allergen notes, parking, whether the toddler survived the meal. A purpose-built app gives you the fields its designers thought of. A spreadsheet gives you the fields you thought of.
- It is free, and it is already there. No new account, no new subscription, no new icon on a home screen that already has too many.
- It does arithmetic no app will do for you. Average spend per head by city, total spent on eating out this year, your rating drift over time: all one formula away. If you like the numbers, this is genuinely the better tool.
Where it breaks, and it is not where you think
The usual complaint about spreadsheets is that they are ugly or fiddly. That is not the real problem. The real problem is a mismatch between when you capture and when you retrieve.
- Entry happens at the worst possible moment. You are at a table, on a phone, with a keyboard covering half of a grid built for a mouse. Typing eleven cells into a phone spreadsheet is a thing people do twice and then stop doing. This is the failure, and every other one follows from it.
- There is no map, and the question is always spatial. "What did we like near here?" is the question you actually ask, and a spreadsheet fundamentally cannot answer it. The HYPERLINK trick above gets you one place at a time; it cannot show you the six you are standing between.
- Photos do not fit. You can drop an image into a cell, and after forty of them the file is slow and the phone app struggles. The one thing you will definitely have from every meal is the thing the format handles worst.
- Nobody else is in it. Share the sheet and your friends can edit your data; that is not the same as seeing where your friends have been. A shared spreadsheet is a document with several editors, not a social record.
- Nothing removes an entry when you go. The wishlist and the archive live in the same column, and the day you finally eat at the place you saved eighteen months ago, you must remember to go back and change a cell. Nobody does. So the list slowly stops being true, which is the quiet way these sheets die.
The honest test
Build it. It takes half an hour and this page has given you everything you need. Then check in March: are you still filling it in?
For a meaningful number of people the answer is yes, and those people should stay exactly where they are: nothing below is an upgrade for them. For most people the answer is that the last entry is from six weeks ago, and the reason is always the same: capture cost more than the memory was worth in the moment.
If that is you, what you want is not a better spreadsheet. It is the same data model with the capture cost taken out (a place, a score, a dish, a status) where adding one takes fifteen seconds on a phone, the map draws itself, the wishlist clears itself when you review the place, and your friends are in it. That is what a proper wishlist does that column I cannot, and it is the difference between a record you maintain and one that maintains itself.
Crumble is free, exports what you put in, and rates on the same 0–5 you were going to use in column G. If you want to see how it compares against the rest of the category first, our roundup of the best restaurant tracking apps is the fair version, and if your other system is a pile of pins then Google Maps lists is the page to read.
Frequently asked questions
How do I make a restaurant tracker in Google Sheets?
Eleven columns: date, place, city, area, cuisine, dish, rating, price, status (Been / Want to go), a would-return checkbox, and notes. Put dropdowns on city, cuisine and status so the categories cannot drift, add a colour scale to the rating column, freeze the header row and turn on a filter. Then four formulas on a Summary tab: AVERAGE with FILTER for repeat visits, COUNTIF for your wishlist length, SORT with UNIQUE for the cities you have eaten in, and a sorted FILTER for your top ten. About half an hour in total.
Is there a free Google Sheets restaurant template?
The full structure is in this guide and costs nothing: columns, formulas and settings. There is a paid-template cottage industry around exactly this build, and it exists because the demand is real, not because the structure is hard. Anything a paid template adds on top of the eleven columns above is decoration.
Spreadsheet or app for tracking restaurants?
Spreadsheet if you want total control over the fields, arithmetic across your history, and a file you own outright and can export forever. An app if the thing stopping you is entry: logging a meal on a phone at a table is where spreadsheets fail, and everything else follows from that. The honest test is whether you are still filling the sheet in three months after you built it.
How do I add a map to a Google Sheets restaurant tracker?
You cannot, not properly. The closest workaround is a HYPERLINK formula that builds a Google Maps search from the name and city columns, which gives you a clickable link per row. That answers "where is this one" but not "what did we like near here", and the second question is the one you actually ask when standing in a street.
How do I share a Google Sheets restaurant list with friends?
Use the Share button and decide between viewer and editor access. A view-only link lets friends browse and filter your list without touching it. Editor access lets them add places too, which is how couples and groups run a shared list, but it also means anyone can change or delete your rows, so check the version history now and then.
Is this template for restaurant owners?
No. Most "restaurant tracker" templates for Google Sheets are back-office tools for sales, inventory and staff schedules. This one is for diners: a personal record of places you have eaten and places you want to try, with your own rating and the dish worth ordering.
Why do restaurant spreadsheets stop getting filled in?
Because capture happens at the worst possible moment (at a table, on a phone, on a grid built for a mouse), while retrieval happens weeks later somewhere else. Typing eleven cells into a phone spreadsheet is something most people do twice. The second reason is that nothing clears an entry when you go: the wishlist and the archive share one column, so the list slowly stops being true.
Start your restaurant list today
Keep the sheet if it works for you. If entry is the part that keeps failing, Crumble is free, runs in the browser you already have, and turns the same place, dish, rating and status into a map your friends can see. Adding a place takes about fifteen seconds on a phone.