How to describe food in Spanish (beyond "está rico")

✌🏼 ¡Hola aventurero!

Lunch at a Spanish friend's house. First spoonful, everyone looks at you, and out comes ¡Está rico! Second course: ¡Está rico! Dessert: …está rico 😅

Nothing wrong with it. But if you want to describe food in Spanish properly, and say it's crunchy, that it tastes of garlic, or (very politely) that it needs a pinch of salt, you need a few more words.

So let's get you them: taste, texture, how it's cooked, and what to say when it's amazing… or not quite.

1Está rico or es rico?

Teacher bit first 🤓 With food, estar and ser do two different jobs.

Estar is for this plate, right now: how it tastes, whether it's hot or cold, if it's cooked. Ser is for what a food is like in general, or what it is.

So when you're tasting something, it's almost always está. And careful with es rico about a person: Mi vecino es muy rico means your neighbour is very rich 💸

It's the same split you use for people. My visual guide to ser and estar has the full picture.

2What does it taste of?

The key phrase is sabe a + a noun. It comes from saber, which means "to know" and also "to taste". Sé la respuesta (I know the answer), but Sabe a limón (It tastes of lemon).

Sabe a poco is a lovely one. Literally "it tastes of little", it means the portion was too small for how good it was.

And these are the main taste words:

3Crunchy, creamy, juicy: texture words

Texture is what makes your description sound like you actually ate the thing:

Meloso comes from miel (honey), and in Spain it's the word for a rice dish that's creamy and a bit runny, between a paella and a risotto.

4How it's cooked

On menus in Spain, the way something's cooked usually comes after the name: pescado a la plancha, pollo al horno. These are the ones you'll see most:

For meat, you'll be asked ¿Cómo la quiere? (How would you like it?). Answer with poco hecha (rare), al punto (medium) or muy hecha (well done). The -a ending is there because la carne is feminine.

For ordering all this in a bar, have a look at Spanish phrases for a tapas bar in Spain.

5From "wow" to "hmm"

Here's a scale, from the best thing you've ever eaten down to "not for me":

Teacher bit 🤓 -ísimo makes any adjective stronger: bueno becomes buenísimo, tierno becomes tiernísimo. With rico, the c changes to qu to keep the same hard sound: riquísimo.

Le falta… (it's missing…) is the polite way to criticise. Está malo sounds harsh at someone's table. Le falta un poquito de sal sounds like friendly advice. And No es lo mío puts it on you, not the cook.

6Lunch at a friend's house

Here's how it can sound. Carmen has made rice for friends, and Tom is tasting it:

7Describe your food this week

1. 1

   Describe your next meal in three words

   Pick one taste word, one texture word and one verdict, then build a sentence: Las patatas están saladas, crujientes y de muerte.

2. 2

   Read a Spanish menu

   Find the menu (la carta) of any restaurant in Spain online and spot three ways of cooking from the "How food is cooked" table. Then say what you'd order out loud: Yo pediría el pescado a la plancha.

3. 3

   Practise the polite ones

   Say Le falta un poquito de sal and No es lo mío a few times until they come out easily, so they're ready at a friend's table.

Food is one of the everyday topics in my Roadmaps, where you get games, speaking prompts and cheat sheets to practise it step by step 🗺️

Now I'm hungry 👀 What's the best thing you've eaten this year? Describe it with one taste word and one texture word, and cuéntame in the comments!

Lucía · Linguist, translator, Spanish teacher and author of the Visual Spanish Grammar Book.
Come and learn Spanish with me and other aventureros like yourself at skool.com/learnspanish 🎉