Why I started DishRated to remember our favorite dinners

Dana, my wife, cooked the meals. We scored them. Now we use those favorites to help decide what to have for dinner. That is the simplest explanation of why I started DishRated, and it is still the part of the idea that matters most to me.

There is a useful difference between knowing that you have eaten some good dinners and being able to look back at the actual meals. A name and a photo give you something specific to return to. A rating adds another piece: how much you wanted to have that meal again. Together, they make a much better starting point for the next dinner decision.

I wanted to keep that connection between eating something and remembering it later. The meal comes first. The record is there to help us come back to it. That keeps the purpose pretty straightforward, even while I am still figuring out how to make the product better.

The food on DishRated comes from real cooking. Dana’s meals are part of the reason there is something worth saving in the first place. A photo of one of those dinners has a different job from a polished food image: it helps us recognize something we actually ate. The useful question is whether we would choose it again.

A rating gives that question a little structure. It does not have to settle every possible opinion about a dish. It can simply help us remember our own response. Someone else might feel differently about the same meal, and our preferences might change too. For choosing our next dinner, our experience is the relevant place to start.

I am still building, and there is more I want to improve. The reason for doing it remains simple: Dana cooks meals worth remembering, we have our own opinions about them, and those memories can help us answer a very practical question. What should we have for dinner?