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Food and drink in Polish

The words you'll use in the shop, the kitchen and the restaurant. Tap a row to hear it.

Food vocabulary is where learning Polish suddenly feels practical, because you use it the moment you walk into a shop, a bakery, or a bar mleczny (the classic Polish milk-bar canteen). The general word for food is jedzenie, and two verbs will carry you a long way: jeść (to eat) and pić (to drink). With those and a handful of nouns you can already handle most of a meal.

The most useful sentence pattern to drill is the polite request. Poproszę… means “I'll have… / please give me…” and it's how Poles order almost everything: poproszę kawę (a coffee, please), poproszę wodę (some water, please), poproszę chleb (some bread, please). It's warmer and more natural than a bare “I want,” and shopkeepers hear it hundreds of times a day. To ask the price, add Ile to kosztuje? (how much is it?) and you're fully equipped at the counter.

A few staples are worth knowing not just as words but as pieces of the culture. Chleb (bread) is taken seriously in Poland, with real bakeries on most streets; pierogi (stuffed dumplings) are the dish every visitor tries first; and herbata (tea) and kawa (coffee) fuel daily life. Note that many food nouns change their ending when they become the object of a verb — “I like coffee” is lubię kawę, with the -a shifting to -ę — a gentle first taste of the accusative case you'll meet properly in the lessons.

Use the tables below to build up your basics, fruit and vegetables, and restaurant phrases. Tap each row to hear it, and try saying a short order out loud — Dzień dobry, poproszę kawę i wodę — as if you were really at the counter. Rehearsing whole phrases, not just single words, is what makes the language come out smoothly when it counts.

Basics — podstawy

Fruit & vegetables — owoce i warzywa

Drinks — napoje

Keep going

Drill these in the word games (pick the Food topic) or My Vocabulary. Related guides: greetings & phrases, family members, colours.