It always started the same way. Six o'clock, the day's energy depleted, someone asking where do you want to eat. Then twenty minutes of opening Yelp, opening Google Maps, scrolling, comparing star ratings, opening a fourth-party menu PDF, closing it, considering takeout, abandoning takeout, ending up in the same neighborhood pizza place we always end up in.
The tools were the problem. Every restaurant app had quietly turned itself into a feed. Endless options, filterable along eleven dimensions, sortable by recency, popularity, distance, price, dietary restriction — and worse, every option was fine. None of them were obviously wrong. So you'd just keep scrolling, looking for the option that would let you commit. It never came.
The "feed" is the bug
A feed is the right interface for things you don't have to act on — news, photos, jokes from friends. It's the wrong interface for a decision that has to end in get in the car. A feed defers commitment. It tells you, implicitly, that there's always something better one more scroll down. That's exactly what you don't need at six pm on a Tuesday.
What we wanted was the opposite shape: a single button that hands you one suggestion and walks away. Not here are 47 nearby restaurants, sorted. Just: go here. If you hate it, hit the button again.
The hardest part wasn't the picking
Apple's MapKit will happily hand you a list of restaurants within a radius. That's an afternoon. The hard part was deciding what to leave out. Every instinct as a developer is to add a filter, a knob, a customization. We resisted almost all of them.
At its core, Tonight's Table has four controls: where you are, how far you'll go, whether to hit GPS, and the big button. We kept the default experience that simple on purpose — no price range, no opening-hours toggle, no endless feed. We watched ourselves want to add each of these and forced ourselves to ask: does this make a six-pm-Tuesday decision faster, or slower?
If a feature gives you something to think about, it's the wrong feature for this app.
The visited log was a natural addition. Over a few weeks of dogfooding it became obvious: the random pick wasn't useful if it kept landing on the same five places. So we built a way to mark places as "been there, done that," and a toggle to skip them next time. That's it.
How we pay for it
Every feature is free for everyone — the cuisine style picker, the wider search radius (up to 45 miles), the hide-chains filter, and the "skip the places I've already been" toggle. To keep it that way, the free app is supported by ads. If you'd rather not see them, a one-time Remove Ads purchase ($4.99) turns them off for good; it doesn't unlock anything, because nothing is locked. (Anyone who bought the old "Pro" upgrade is permanently ad-free.)
We don't run a server of our own, and your visited log and ratings stay on your phone — we never see them. We're upfront about the one place data does change hands: the ads in the free app come from a third-party ad partner (Google AdMob is planned) that collects data and may use your advertising identifier to personalize ads, subject to the App Tracking Transparency prompt you can decline. Remove Ads stops that entirely.
Tonight, just go
The product idea isn't novel. People have been writing "I can't decide where to eat" Reddit posts since Reddit existed. What we hope is novel is the discipline — refusing to dress up a one-button app as a feed, keeping every feature free for everyone, and being honest about how we keep the lights on.
Stop scrolling. Start eating. That's the entire pitch.