Plan a multi-stop night out by shortlisting the places you are considering, grouping them into one plan, then ordering them by where you will go first. DineHop calls that a Hop: a single list of venues for a single evening, each carrying its own opening hours, distance and official hygiene rating.
Six people, one group chat, forty messages. Somebody posts a link. Somebody else posts a screenshot of a menu. A third person asks whether the first place is even open on a Tuesday. By the time anyone checks, the thread has scrolled past the only useful message in it.
The problem is not that restaurants are hard to find. It is that a night out is rarely one restaurant, and nothing most people use is built to hold more than one.
Why "where shall we eat?" is the wrong question
Ask a group where to eat and you get a single answer to a question with several parts. A real evening usually has a shape: somewhere to start, somewhere to eat properly, and somewhere to end up. Each stop has its own constraints. The first place needs to be open early. The second needs to take a group of six. The third needs to still be serving at eleven.
A single pin on a map answers none of that. Neither does a list of bookmarks, because a bookmark forgets why you saved it. Two weeks later you are looking at a name with no memory of whether it was the wine bar someone recommended or the place you already decided against.
How to plan a multi-stop night out
- Shortlist first, decide later. As you search, hold down anything that looks
plausible and it goes to a draft list. No naming, no committing, no deciding yet. This is the step most tools skip, and it is the one that stops good options getting lost.
- Group the survivors into one plan. Once you have five or six candidates, put the
ones that belong to the same evening into a single Hop and give it a name. "Saturday, Ana's birthday" is a plan. A folder called "Restaurants" is not.
- Order them by the evening, not by rating. Drinks, then dinner, then dessert. The
order is the plan.
- Check the constraints in place. Each venue in the Hop carries its own opening hours,
how far it is from you now, its price range, and its official hygiene rating. You are not opening four browser tabs to find out whether stop two is open.
- Share the plan, not forty messages. One list beats a thread nobody will scroll back
through.
Keeping track of places you might want to go
Separately from any specific evening, there is the running list: the places someone mentioned, the ones you walked past, the ones you keep meaning to try.
DineHop keeps those in Saved, and Saved is searchable, filterable and sorted nearest-first, because a list of ninety places you cannot search is a list you will never open again. You can filter by cuisine, by area, by whether it is open right now, and by your own verdict on it. Private notes attach to any place, so "the one with the courtyard, book ahead" survives longer than your memory of it does.
What happens after you have been
Most apps stop at the door. The useful part starts afterwards.
Mark a place as somewhere you went, and it moves out of the pile of maybes and into a record of what you actually thought. That verdict then filters your Saved list, so the next time you are deciding, you are choosing between places you know you liked rather than scrolling past the one that disappointed you eighteen months ago.
Whether it works outside the UK
Search works worldwide, and the app is available in ten languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian and Arabic, including right-to-left layout.
Official food-hygiene ratings are shown wherever the local government publishes them. That currently covers the United Kingdom's FSA scheme, France's Alim'confiance, Singapore's SFA grades, Finland's Oiva, national data for Denmark and Norway, and city inspection data for New York City, Chicago, Austin and Toronto. Where no official scheme exists, no rating is shown, rather than a guess dressed up as one.
What is new in DineHop 1.3.0
- Hops: named plans holding several venues for one occasion, with a lifecycle from
draft through to been-there.
- Saved, rebuilt: searchable, filterable, nearest-first, with intent tiers and a
been-there verdict.
- A permanent Home, Hops and Profile shell, replacing the floating shortlist button.
- Filter by real money, not price bands, plus a minimum-rating filter with a
review-count floor so one five-star review cannot carry a place.
- Live distance and a compass arrow on the place header.
- Dietary and cuisine filters fixed outside English, which previously returned nothing
in some countries.
DineHop is free on Android. It does not take bookings and does not deliver food. It helps you work out where to go, which is the part that actually takes the time.
Common questions
Can I plan a restaurant crawl in one app?
Yes. A Hop is one named plan holding several venues, so drinks, dinner and dessert sit in the same list instead of scattered across messages, screenshots and browser tabs.
Do I need an account to plan a night out?
No. Searching, browsing and building a Hop all work signed out. A free account is required to save places, keep private notes and write a review, and signing in syncs your plans and saved places to the account instead of leaving them on one phone.
Does DineHop take bookings?
No. DineHop is a discovery app, not a booking or delivery service. It surfaces each venue's phone number, opening hours and directions so you can call ahead or walk in.
Which countries have food-hygiene ratings?
Ratings are shown wherever an official government scheme publishes them, currently the United Kingdom, France, Singapore, Finland, Denmark and Norway, plus New York City, Chicago, Austin and Toronto.
Shipped in DineHop 1.3.0 for Android.