Palate

A hobby app for keeping a private restaurant journal and turning it into a printed guide at the end of the year.

My role: Lead Designer, iOS and Android engineer
Team: Solo designer, iOS and Android engineer
When: 2026 · 2026, ongoing
Platforms: iOS, Android, Website

Visit Palate’s website, opens in a new tab

fastest meal-logging path: <20 sec
shipped to both stores: iOS + Android

The 30-second version

Problem: Meal memories end up in notes, spreadsheets and messages. Public review apps do not make a personal archive.
What I did: Designed and built Palate on iOS and Android, including a seven-tier rating system and a printable annual guide.
Result: Live on both stores. The fastest meal-logging path takes under 20 seconds.

Context and constraints

Palate is a private restaurant journal for people who travel to eat and take food seriously. There's no social side to it at all. You log your meals through the year, and in December they become a print-ready PDF, laid out like a small magazine, that you can print and keep on a shelf.

My role and the team

I designed and built Palate on both platforms. The Atelier visual system is mine, designed in Figma. I wrote the iOS app in SwiftUI with SwiftData and the Android app in Kotlin, built the shared backend on Firestore and Cloudflare Workers, and set up the subscription on both stores.

The problem

People who care about food keep track of meals everywhere: the Notes app, spreadsheets, group chats, Instagram DMs. Yelp, Resy, and Beli are built for public reviews and discovery. Notes has no structure, and Instagram isn't built to be a record. None of them help you remember the dish you had in Lisbon two summers ago, or look back at a year of eating.

Key decisions

01 / 02

Keep the journal private

Options: Add social and discovery features, or keep the journal focused on personal entries.
The call: Leave social and discovery out of v1.
Why: I wanted a private record, without anything pulling it toward another social app.
Tradeoff: Giving up the reach those features could bring was deliberate.

02 / 02

Use the app’s views for print

The call: Generate the annual PDF from the same views used on screen.
Why: When I change the design, the printed guide changes with it. The annual guide is the main thing the subscription pays for.

The work

Palate welcome screen with food photography and the tagline: a private guide to the places you love. — The first screen shows only your own places. There's no feed and no trending list.

Palate onboarding screen explaining three principles: keep a record, find your patterns, print a guide. — Onboarding explains the idea: log your meals, and over the year they add up to a guide.

Palate Guide screen with a magazine-style masthead, city filters, and a featured Atomix entry with a three-star rating. — The Guide, laid out like a magazine, with serif mastheads, burgundy accents, and the tier marks.

Palate restaurant detail screen for Wildair showing a food photo, pull quote, star rating, and visit history. — A restaurant entry, with a pull quote, the dates you went, who you were with, and what you ordered.

Palate Map screen showing 22 saved restaurants across New York City, each marked by tier. — Every place you've logged, on a map and marked by tier. The map fills in on its own as you log.

Palate Search screen with faceted indexes by cuisine, by year, and by companion. — The archive sorts itself by cuisine, year, and who you ate with, from what you logged. There are no tags to manage.

Your year in numbers, a preview of the annual guide, and a few notes on how you eat.

How it scaled

The 2026 Edition PDF is generated from the same views as the app. Design changes carry into the printed guide.

Results

Live on the App Store and Google Play. Logging a meal takes under 20 seconds, and in December the year's entries become a printable guide rendered from the app's own screens.

fastest meal-logging path: <20 sec; The reported fastest path is camera, then place, then tier, then save.
shipped to both stores: iOS + Android

Reflection

Leaving out social and discovery was the hardest call, since every other food app is built on them. I'm betting a private journal is enough on its own.