You want to wish someone a good meal at work or otherwise.
But is the phrase enjoy your meal a suitable way to express this?
In this article, we’ll show you what to say instead of enjoy your meal when you want to diversify your phrasing.
Thereafter, we’ll discuss the correctness of this phrase and some common variations of it.
7 Alternative Ways to Say “Enjoy Your Meal”4
Check out these 7 other ways to say enjoy your meal at work or otherwise:
- Bon Appétit
- Dig in
- We hope you enjoy
- Have a good meal
- Eat up
- I hope you enjoy your dinner
- I hope your food is delicious
1. Bon Appétit
The French phrase bon appétit is a common salutation that you can use when someone is about to partake in a meal.
This phrase is essentially a direct synonym of enjoy your meal, although its literal translation is actually “good appetite.”
Therefore, you can use it if you work in a restaurant or are hosting a dinner party and want to encourage your guests to enjoy the food you have prepared or served.
Let’s have a look at how to say this phrase in an example:
Chef Collette has prepared steak au poivre with red wine pan sauce. Bon appétit!
2. Dig In
To dig into some food means to start eating eagerly or enthusiastically.
Therefore, if you say dig into someone else, you are essentially encouraging them to consume their food with gusto!
After all, this phrase creates the image of someone figuratively shoveling food into their mouth. Thus, it’s not exactly a sophisticated phrase suited for a high-end restaurant.
However, this is a fun little phrase that you can say when you are hosting some close friends or family in a casual setting.
For instance:
Well, don’t let your dinner get cold, everyone – dig in!
3. We Hope You Enjoy
Perhaps you work in a small business or a fast-food restaurant that frequently provides delivery orders to customers.
In this situation, you may have limited face-to-face interactions with your buyers. Thus, it’s a good idea to write little messages on the take-away packaging.
This will show your positive attitude and good customer service, even though you won’t be serving food to the other person directly.
We hope you enjoy is a perfect phrase to use. After all, the use of “we” implies that you are speaking on behalf of your whole restaurant and team of staff.
This will let the customer know that you value them and their business.
Consider the example below:
Thank you for your order! We hope you enjoy.
4. Have a Good Meal
Another way to say enjoy your meal is have a good meal.
This is a polite phrase that you can use in a professional setting when a coworker is about to enjoy their lunch break.
You can also use it if your colleague is having a business lunch outside of the office, perhaps with clients or other professionals.
This phrase is a great choice regardless of the nature of your relationship with the other person. After all, it is fairly tonally neutral.
Thus, you can use it with a friend at work or a coworker that you don’t know particularly well.
For example:
Okay, Sheryl, I’ll see you at the four o’clock meeting. Have a good meal!
5. Eat Up
Eat up is another casual and instructive phrase that you can use when you are hosting guests and you want to encourage them to tuck into the meal you’ve prepared.
This phrase is essentially imploring your guests to really enjoy their food. In other words, they don’t need to eat it daintily or politely!
You can also use this phrase to encourage children to finish what’s on their plate. After all, they are sure to need energy for all the shenanigans they will get up to once dinner is finished.
See how we’ve used this phrase in the example below:
Eat up before it gets cold, kids!
6. I Hope You Enjoy Your Dinner
If you work as a waiter or server at a restaurant and don’t participate in the preparation of a meal, you might want to use a more tentative phrase than enjoy your meal.
After all, enjoy your meal comes across as a tad instructive. This makes it particularly suitable if you are the chef and you want to encourage your guests to start eating.
Meanwhile, the use of “I hope” in this alternative indicates that you have no control over the meal itself.
However, you hope the customer enjoys their experience nevertheless.
To see what we mean, have a look at the following example:
Please let me know if I can get you anything else. I hope you enjoy your dinner!
7. I Hope Your Food Is Delicious
If you have a friendly relationship with one of your colleagues at work, you can use a more familiar phrase like I hope your food is delicious.
This is a good response if a colleague has told you they are going to take a break to enjoy the lunch they have prepared.
You can also use it if they have mentioned that they will be trying a new restaurant after work.
Essentially, this phrase expresses hope that they enjoy a very fine quality meal and have a great experience overall.
It’s a nice sentiment, whatever the circumstances!
Check out our final example to see this phrase in action:
Have a great evening, Naledi. I hope your food is delicious!
Is It Correct to Say “Enjoy Your Meal”?
It is perfectly correct to say enjoy your meal in a number of circumstances.
On one hand, you can use this phrase when you have prepared a meal for someone and want to encourage them to enjoy it.
On the other hand, you can use this phrase when you can see that someone is about to start eating and you are leaving them to do just that.
For example, if you see a colleague at work about to eat their lunch, you might say enjoy your meal to indicate that they should enjoy their break and not worry about work for the moment.
Below, we’ve drafted two examples to illustrate how you might use this phrase in practice.
First, let’s look at how you can wish a colleague a good meal at work:
I’ll leave you to your lunch break. Enjoy your meal!
Next, let’s see a message that you might find on your takeaway packaging when you have ordered food from a restaurant:
Thank you for your order! We hope you enjoy your meal!
Finally, let’s look at some common variations of this phrase and discuss whether or not they are correct.
Variations: Replacing the word meal with food, dinner, or lunch
- Enjoy your food
- Enjoy your dinner
- Enjoy your lunch
It is correct to replace “meal” with any of the nouns above.
Depending on the time of day and type of meal, you can generally use any of the above variations interchangeably with the original.
Although the phrase enjoy your meal is correct, it’s rather standardized.
Therefore, it wouldn’t hurt to mix up your phrasing from time to time using one or more of the alternative phrases from our list.
