Speak Better English at Work: Practical English for Waiters, Servers, Baristas, and more!

Use your job to actively improve your English. I’ll show you how to use work in a restaurant, café, or bar to improve your English. Every interaction is a chance to practice real, useful language. And once you are used to the basics, you can take your English even higher – you’ll probably get better tips as a bonus! I’ll teach you polite phrases to welcome customers, explain menu items, take orders, and respond to regulars. You’ll also learn small talk expressions like “Cold out today, isn’t it?” Whether you’re working in a formal restaurant or a local café, this lesson will help you build better customer relationships—and better English (and get better tips). Test your skills with the quiz: https://www.engvid.com/practical-engl... Get extra help with your English: https://HoneYourEnglish.com More o English for ordering food: allergies, vegan, halal, gluten-free...    • English for Ordering Food: Allergies, Vega...   How to talk about wine in English    • How to talk about wine in English: Vocabul...   In this lesson: 0:00 Use YOUR life to improve your English 1:59 greeting customers 2:43 introducing your business 4:34 recommendations 5:04 make small talk 8:25 How would they like their food? 11:02 make sure they're happy TRANSCRIPT: Hello, folks. Welcome back. My name's Benjamin. Welcome to my channel. Thank you so much for coming here. What are we doing today? Well, what I'm looking at today is how you can use any situation you are in to improve your English. Let us suppose you go to an English-speaking country, and you are in the position where you have to take any work you can get, and a lot of those jobs tend to be in the service industries. For example, working in a restaurant, being a waiter, yep, doing sort of physical, manual work. But even though the work may seem simple, there's a lot that you can learn linguistically to become more fluent in English. So it's about what I'm trying to encourage here is a pride in the work so that you constantly want to extend your English ability to give the customer a better experience. What am I talking about? I'm going to give you in this lesson a few new ideas for phrases you can use if you're working in a cafe, restaurant, bar, that kind of thing, okay? It's a sort of functional language lesson. So, what you want to be doing is building relationships with the customers so that you recognize them, they know that you're interested in them, it will result in better tips and a happier day. They come in the door. We need to greet them. Yep. Come in the door. "Hello, welcome back." Yep. "Nice to see you again." It's someone new. "Strange place, they don't know where they are." "Hello, how can I help you today?" Take an interest, try to help them. "How can I help you today?" This is quite formal here. "Hello, sir. Hello, madam." You would say that if you were working in a smart restaurant. If you're working in a kind of normal cafe or something, we need to be more informal. "Hello. Hi. How are you?" Or, "Welcome. How can I help you today?" Now, something I find really useful if I go into a new place is if someone takes the time to guide me through the options so that I'm not staring at a menu going, "I don't know what to have." Yep. Even if you go into a bar, it'd be nice if the barman or the barmaid says, "Look, we've got some lovely wines. We've got this. We've got a Rioja. We've got a Malbec, a Cabernet Sauvignon." And, you know, really talks you through the menu. So, what that means is taking the time to really know how to talk about what you're serving. I think I've spelt this word wrong. Sorry, it's not in my normal vocabulary. I think we should be finding an R somewhere in there. "Shawarma"? "Shawarma", isn't it? Let's put an R in there. Poor shawarma. So, I went into a place today where the guide could have been something like this. We serve kebabs, shawarmas with a range... Am I saying that right? Shawarma? Shawarma? I'm sorry if I got it wrong. With a range of meats, a range, a choice of meats, or vegetarian options, choices. We also have an extensive range of salads. Okay, look, I'm using a very normal situation to show off my incredible vocabulary. Talk us through it. What can we have in your cafe, in your restaurant, in your bar? Yeah? Make the customer's choice easier if they're new to it. Obviously, if they've been here many times, they probably know what they want. And they're like, "Uh, uh, I don't know. Can I think about it for a minute?" So you say, "No problem. You take your time." Maybe you give them a bit more help. My personal recommendation is the grilled blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah? My personal recommendation is the soup of the day. Have something to say. Have something to say. What would you have if you were choosing? Conditional tense. What would you...? […]