Palate is a private guidebook for the meals you’d return for. Quietly editorial, beautifully archived, and printable, at year’s end, as an annual you’ll keep on a shelf.
Private by default
Yours across devices
A printable annual
Stars for the rare, a bib for the everyday, a plate for the satisfying, and three marks for the places you’re still considering. No five-star slider. No half-points. A clear opinion, every time.
Three Stars
Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey.
Two Stars
Excellent cooking, worth a detour.
One Star
A very good restaurant in its category.
Bib
Good quality, good value cooking.
Plate
A good meal.
Watching
On the radar, haven't been yet.
Blocklist
Never again.
from one editor, your own.
Le Bernardin.
“A tasting that keeps the room quiet, every dish a careful underline.”
Three stars do not arrive often. They are the dinners that linger in a journal: a duck, a canelé, a glass that paused conversation. Palate marks them quietly, in the same hand as the rest.
Eight times
family · friends
Frenchette.
French · West Village
Atomix.
Korean · Flatiron
Estela.
American · NoLita
Cervo's.
Iberian · Lower East
Tatiana
American · Lincoln Square
Tabla
Indian · Tokyo
Bouchon Lyonnais
French · Lyon
La Mère Brazier
French · Lyon
Adding a meal should feel like jotting in a notebook, not filling a form. The flow is four steps, and three of them are optional. The result is a calm record you’ll trust, and use.
Photograph
Catch the dish before it cools, camera opens straight to a frame.
Place it
Nearby restaurants surface in seconds. One tap and it’s yours.
Mark it
Pick a tier. The whole opinion lives in a single, considered tap.
Keep it
It lands in your guide and follows you to the annual edition.
“If a feature needs a tooltip, redesign it.”
Open to a clean masthead and a single invitation to begin your own guide.
Every place keeps its visits, dishes, companions, and photos, a private history.
Every place you’ve marked, plotted at a glance. Open the city, plan a Tuesday, or drop into Trip mode in Tokyo, the map narrows to the days you’re away and forgets the rest until you return.
Trip mode
Auto-scopes to the city you land in.
Tier rings
Solid for visited, dashed for watching.
Filters
Tier, cuisine, price, year, all in one drawer.
Pins
Your photo, your guide, your taste.
New York.
a private guide by Jordan Cross.
’26
48
Restaurants
92
Dishes
6
Cities
Each December, Palate publishes you. A bound, printable PDF, three-star spreads, a one-star index, year-end notes from your own pen. The kind of object you hand a friend at dinner instead of a phone.
Hand-set spreads
Cover, three-star section, all-time index.
Drop caps in burgundy
An accent that finds the page first.
Tabular numerals
Years and counts in a steady hand.
AirDrop or print
Your printer makes a perfectly fine bookbinder.
Three stars do not arrive often. They are the dinners that linger in a journal, a duck, a canelé, a glass that paused conversation. Palate marks them quietly, in the same hand as the rest.
Palate is single-user, single-purpose. Your taste is no one else’s metric. Read the full policy for the long answer.
Nothing is published
No reviews, no followers, no algorithm. Your guide is yours alone.
Counts only, opt-out
Anonymous telemetry tracks how features are used, never names, notes, photos, or locations.
Sign in your way
Apple, Google, or email. Sync runs on Firebase; the data is fenced to your account.
Yours to leave
Delete the account in-app. Auth, data, and photos are wiped in a tap.
Palate.
Free
The whole app, fully working. Mark tiers, log dishes, build the guide.
Most diarists never hit the cap.
Palate Pro.
$4.99
/ yearLess than a diner breakfast. Unlimited entries and a fresh PDF every December.
Auto-renews annually until cancelled.
The 2026 Edition.
$9.99
one-timeFor the diner who doesn’t want a subscription. Unlock just this year’s volume, yours forever.
A new Edition ships each January.
The short answers. For the long ones, read the privacy policy or write to support@palate-journal.app.
There’s a free tier good for up to 30 restaurants. Palate Pro is $4.99 a year for unlimited entries and the annual PDF. A one-time $9.99 unlocks just the current year’s edition forever.
No. Nothing in your guide is published, ranked, sold, or shared. Optional anonymous telemetry tracks how features are used, never restaurant names, notes, photos, or locations. You can turn it off in Settings.
Everything is wiped: your sign-in, your stored data, your uploaded photos, and your local cache. We can’t recover it afterward, because we don’t keep a copy.
Yes, both iPhone and iPad are supported. The map and the PDF preview look especially good on the larger screen.
Yes, Palate is live on Google Play now. It’s the same guide, the same seven marks, the same map and annual PDF as iOS. Sign in with Google, Apple, or email and your guide syncs across both.
Every December, the app generates a print-ready PDF of your year. Pro subscribers get one for every year they’ve kept the guide.
Share an individual restaurant or visit as an image card, or hand them the annual PDF. There is no public profile and no social graph by design.
Several apps already used the name Palate. The in-app brand stays as Palate. with the burgundy dot. On both the App Store and Google Play, the listing and home-screen name is Palate Journal.
iPhone, iPad, and Android. Free to keep, free to leave. Listed on the App Store and Google Play as Palate Journal.