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This is an All Ears English Podcast, Episode 164: “How Was Your Meal: 3 Phrases TO GO.”

Welcome to the All Ears English Podcast, where you’ll finally get real, native English conversation with your hosts, Lindsay McMahon, the ‘English Adventurer’ and Gabby Wallace, the ‘Language Angel’, from Boston, USA.

Hey, Gabby. Are you busy these days?

I’m always busy. And I think our listeners are always busy too. That’s the kind of world we live in.

Yeah, that’s right. So if our listeners are busy, it would make sense for them to actually focus just on the key phrases that they need to know to speak with natives, right?

Yeah, absolutely. That’s why we made an e-book with the 100 most common phrases in English, so that you can get the most out of your time studying English. You can find that at AllEarsEnglish.com/100. That’s the number 1-0-0.

Are you tired of listening to yourself chew your food. In this episode, we’re gonna (going to) help you generate some great conversation with your dinner partners.

Hey, Gabby!

Hey, Lindsay. How are you?

Excellent! You?

Great!

I’m so happy today because I like to eat. How about you, do you like to eat?

I love to eat. I love food.

Well, it’s not just about eating Gabby it’s also about socializing and connecting and building relationships with the people you’re eating with. Gosh… Really when I go out to dinner.

…don’t be so selfish.

I can’t just eat, and eat, and eat, and not talk to anyone?

Or you could…

Is that weird?

…but I think your dinner companions would walk away from you, your nose in the… All right. So, I’m being a little silly. When you go out to dinner it’s a great time to socialize.

It’s a great time to get people together and get to know each other and connect with each other in English.

Completely.

But sometimes it’s hard to know what is appropriate to talk about or, or, what phrases to use, and so we made a guide for you with some common English phrases that you can expect and you can use yourself.

So we’re gonna share three phrases with you right now. So let’s, let’s get right into it.

Yeah, let’s just get right into it. Now this phrase is one that you would use at that the beginning of the dinner when you’re just sitting down, dinner or lunch, when you’re just sitting down with your, your, companion, you would say, “Have you eaten here before?” and “What do you recommend?”

Great. Yeah, instead of eating, you could also say, “Have you been here before?” maybe you’re going out to coffee with a colleague, so you might want to just ask, “Have you had coffee here before?”

(Um), that’s an interesting point I just thought of. You wouldn’t really ask, “Have you drunk coffee here before?” We tend to avoid… We do.

…that past…

Yeah.

…’drunk’ because of the connotation it has, (you know), a ‘drunk’ person. So anyway, if you’re at a café you could just say, “Have you been here before?” or “Have you had coffee here before?”

Yeah. Great.

“What do you recommend?” All right.

“What do you recommend?”

Yeah. So it’s like, “What’s your favorite dish?”

Yep. Here you’re building the relationship with the person you’re dining with.

Yeah.

Great way to do it.

Yeah, great. So, you’d recommend – maybe if you’ve had a dish before. If you haven’t been to the restaurant or café before, (um), then you wouldn’t really get this question, “What do you recommend?”

Only if the answer is “yes.” So, “Have you been here before?” “Yes.” “What do you recommend?”

All right. For example I recommend – I really like that place “Life Alive”… Ooh.

…down in Central Square and I recommend their smoothies because they put together all these cool juices and, oh, it’s great.

Healthy food.

Oh.

Sounds delicious.

Yeah.

Great. Well, okay let’s move forward. Let’s imagine that we’re moving forward in our dinner. We’re, we’re, moving through time here and the next key phrase that’s super common is, “Do you know what you’re going to have?”

Right and here we’re imagining that you’ve already got the, (um), you already have the menu in your hand.

Right.

Right.

Yeah, you wouldn’t ask this before you get the menu, that would be weird.

So it’s after you’ve both been kinda looking at the menu, it’s been kind of quiet you might look up say, “Hey, you know what you’re going to have?”

Yeah or, “Do you know what you’re going to order?” (Uh-hm).

Or, “Do you know what you want to eat?”

Right.

Yeah. So, there’s a few different ways of asking this. And, (you know), what’s the intention here? We wanna we’re curious, we wanna know what the other person is ordering, but we also want to move the dinner along. We wanna get our orders in, right.

Oh, no, especially… Makes you hungry.

…if you, if you have someone who’s quite slow and you’re really hungry… Yeah.

…it’s a good way to move things along, as Gabby said.

Right, right, and you might get a person who is really indecisive, “I don’t know if I should have, (you know), the salad, or the pizza, or the pasta, but the eggplant looks really good, I don’t know.”

That’s so annoying.

What would you do if you were out with someone like that?

I don’t know. I might end the dinner early. I don’t know. Just kidding.

Oh. No, I think you’d try to help them along… Yeah.

…with questions like, “Well, do you feel like something lighter, or are you looking for something heavier? Are you really hungry?”

Maybe the moral of the story is that, it’s, it’s, good to snack before you go to the dinner a little bit, so you’re not so starving, so you don’t lose your temper.

Yeah, well, right because patience is really key here. You can’t show up to a restaurant and expect to eat right away.

(I mean), it takes time to meet the people who you’re going to eat with, have some small talk, look at the menu, put your order in and then all of a sudden, you’ve been waiting an hour before your food shows up.

Oh, yeah, easily.

So, good tip there.

I know.

Good strategy.

Thank you.

Let’s look at a third phrase here, and this one’s super common. I like this one. What, what’s our third one?

Yeah, so here we’re assuming you’ve already received your, your, meal, and (you know), you start eating and (you know), it’s quiet for a little while again and you say, “How’s your meal?”

I like that. So I might say, “Oh, it’s good,” or “It’s great,” or “Yeah, I like it. It’s delicious,” “How’s yours?”

“(Mm), not bad.”

“Not bad?”

“It’s not what I expected but it’s okay.”

“Okay, good.” So yeah, there’s a lot of different ways you could answer this question, (uh), a few different ways you could follow-up. You might wanna (want to) offer a, a taste of your dish to other people.

Right, and how would we say that?

“Oh would you like to try some?”

Right, right. That’s one that we didn’t include here, but, yeah, “Would you like to try?”

Yeah.

“Would you like to try it?”

Yeah. Well, actually we, we’ve created a guide that has additional bonus, phrases that you could use in addition to these phrases that we’re sharing here, that, they go beyond these first level phrases.

So these three phrases are really common and they’re a great way to get conversation started or continue conversation throughout your dinner. And now we’ve just gotten our food, you’re asking, “How’s your meal?”

Of course the dinner continues, (you know), you eat, you finish your food, you might get dessert. So, throughout the meal there are different common phrases that we typically use and these are phrases that are so common, they’re not even in your textbook.

No they’re not in your textbook ‘cause (because) a lot of times in textbooks, we find phrases that are not really that common… Right, because…

…unfortunately.

…textbooks really focus on the structure of a language… Right.

…and I think they make the conversations fit the grammar.

That’s right.

And what we’re trying to do is show you conversations and phrases that fit the situation and your social needs.

Right, because here at All Ears English we care more about connection than we do about perfection.

Ooh, I like that, it even rhymes!

Ooh! Ooh!

Love it! All right. So to find out the other phrases that I was talking about and also to find our, our, longer course, four hours long, (uh), The Keys to Connecting with Americans, you can go to our website at AllEarsEnglish.com/keys, k-e-y-s.

So we hope you’ll take a look and consider the instant download that’s so easy you can… So easy.

…get the whole course in a matter of seconds.

Right. So if you’re feeling like today you want a little more All Ears English you could… Yeah.

…go ahead and get this now and get started now.

Right, right away and, and this includes four parts to this series with four different situations: so dinner, sports event, networking and – what was the last one – (uh), barbeque.

Right, a social event.

That’s right, a social situation.

Great! So thanks for listening today guys and have a great day.

Yeah, and a great dinner.

If you wanna put your ears into English more often, be sure to subscribe to our podcast in iTunes on your computer or on your smartphone. Thanks so much for listening and see you next time.