The best apps for deciding where to eat tonight
Six ways a group settles on a restaurant, including ours, with what each one is good at and where it gives up. Nothing here is ranked by anybody who paid for it.
No download, no sign-up. It opens in your browser.
Last updated August 2026. Everything said here about somebody else’s product was read on their own site, and anything we could not check is described as a shape rather than named as a product.
Wheel of Names
A wheel you type your options into and spin, free and in the browser. Its own site lists weighted segments, shareable wheels, saving locally or to the cloud, and 65 languages, and it is the most used tool of this shape on the web. Good at: any list at all, in about ten seconds, with nothing to install. Where it gives up on dinner: one person types the options and one person spins, so the answer it lands on is nobody’s choice, and it knows nothing about what is open near you. If it is only the first half of that bothering you, our wheel of names alternative is the same idea with everyone swiping instead of one person spinning.
A random restaurant generator site
The single-purpose version: a page that hands you a cuisine, a dish or a chain at random. Good at: breaking a tie when nobody really minds, and at getting the conversation off the word “anywhere”. Where it gives up: one built on a fixed list cannot tell you whether the place it named is near you or still serving at nine on a Tuesday, and, like a wheel, it decides for the group rather than with it. Ours deals real venues around you that are open now, one card at a time: random restaurant picker.
A shared Google Maps list
The one almost everybody already uses. Save places to a list and share it; Google’s own help describes sharing a list to view or to edit, inviting collaborators, and seeing who added or edited each place. Good at: real venues, real hours, real reviews, everyone adding to it, and it keeps working between outings, which no picker does. Where it gives up on tonight: there is no vote in it. A shared list of thirty places at 7pm is still a list of thirty places, and somebody still has to read them out and watch four people shrug.
A poll in the group chat
Free, instant, and already installed on everyone’s phone: put three or four options in a poll and watch the tally. Doodle does the same job with a link rather than a chat, though it is built around finding a time rather than a place. Good at: showing everyone’s preference at once, where the conversation is already happening. Where it gives up: somebody has to write the options first, which is the hard part, and a majority wins, so the two people outvoted eat somewhere they said no to.
Beli
An app for tracking and sharing restaurants with friends, on iOS and Android, described on its own site as a way to “track and share your favorite restaurants with your friends”: lists and maps of places you have been and want to go, what friends thought of them, and recommendations built on that. Good at: the slow half of the problem, so a group with an appetite is not starting from an empty page. Where it gives up: it answers which places are good, not which one the four of you are walking to in ten minutes.
bickr
Ours, so read this one knowing that. A free web app: one of you starts a room and sends a link or a six character code, and two to eight of you swipe the same deck on your own phones. The deck is real places near you, open now, as far out as you are willing to travel. The first venue everyone has said yes to is settled, on every screen at once, and if the deck runs out with nothing agreed it settles on whatever came closest. The same loop runs decks for what to watch and for baby names. The honest tradeoffs: it is a web app rather than a native one, so there is nothing to download and you add it to your home screen instead; venue coverage is best in Australia, which is where it is built and being run first; and it only beats a wheel when more than one person is deciding, because alone a wheel is quicker.
The short version
If one person is choosing, spin something: a wheel is faster than any of this. If the group is collecting places for later, a shared map list is still the best place to keep them, and no picker replaces it. If the group is deciding right now and nobody wants to be the person who picked, that is the narrow case bickr was built for, and it is the only one we would argue about.