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<\/p>\nEating out while you’re in Italy is an absolute must. Dining out goes hand in hand with seeing ancient ruins, grand piazzas, and priceless artistic treasures.<\/p>\n
However, eating out in Italy is not so cut and dry when it comes to language. Although in major tourist cities in Italy, you will generally encounter people who know English, if you want to stand out less and even thrive at the Italian table, you should pack a few key phrases to use when you enter restaurants.<\/p>\n
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When you arrive to an Italian eatery, a wait staff will most likely greet you with, \u201cBuona sera,\u201d meaning, \u201cGood evening.\u201d You will then want to reply with the same greeting and ask for a table for the number of people in your party. To ask this for a party of two, you would say, \u201cUn tavolo per due.\u201d If you know a few numbers in Italian, it makes it easy to adjust this phrase for how many people you are dining with that evening.<\/p>\n
There is no worse feeling than sitting down to a restaurant in Italy and the waiter just stares blankly at you to order, without producing any sort of menu to order from in the process. If you encounter this situation, you need to ask to see a menu. You can say, \u201cPotrei vedere il menu?\u201d You can also say, \u201cMi porta il men\u00fa?\u201d<\/p>\n
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Most waiters in Italy will first ask you what you want to drink before you have even had a look at the menu. To be prepared, you will want to know your types of water. Most likely, you will be asked if you would like aqua naturale or frizzante. Naturale is your basic water while frizzante is sparkling water. In addition, you can generally always order a house wine instead of a bottle from the wine list even if you don\u2019t see it listed on the menu. If you would like to order a house wine, you merely need to request vino rosso della casa, per favore, or vino bianco della casa, per favore. Vino rosso is red wine and vino bianco is white wine.<\/p>\n
So many travelers sit down at a table in Italy and just blurt out English when ordering. If you want to perhaps get treated a little better or fit in a little more, it is actually very simple to say what you want at the Italian table. For yourself, you can say, \u201cVorrei,\u201d plus what dish you would like. This translates into, \u201cI would like\u2026\u201d If you are a group of two or more ordering one set item, you can say, \u201cVorremo,\u201d meaning, \u201cWe would like.\u201d<\/p>\n
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