Food & kitchen words in Hindi

Few subjects matter more in everyday Hindi than food. From the chai stall on the corner to a home-cooked थाली (thaali, plate or platter), meals are how India gathers, hosts, and shows affection. Learning the basic vocabulary here pays off fast: you'll read menus, ask for what you want at a shop, and follow a recipe or a kindly host telling you to eat more.

A word worth flagging at the very start is खाना (khaana). It means food as a noun, but it is also the verb to eat. So the perfectly normal sentence खाना खाना है (khaana khaana hai) means roughly "I have to eat food" — the same word twice, once as the meal and once as the action. Don't let the repetition confuse you; native speakers do this all the time.

Usage notes & common mistakes

Gender agreement. Taste words ending in -a like मीठा change to match the noun. For a feminine noun such as चाय (tea, feminine), you'd say मीठी चाय (meethi chaay), not meetha chaay. Masculine stays मीठा.

"I'm hungry." The natural phrase is मुझे भूख लगी है (mujhe bhookh lagi hai), literally "hunger has struck me". To say you're thirsty, swap in प्यास (pyaas, thirst).

Ordering food. A polite request uses चाहिए (chaahiye, is wanted/needed): एक चाय चाहिए means "I'd like one tea". For the bill or to eat out, our restaurant phrases page picks up where this list leaves off.

A frequent slip is treating चावल (rice) as plural-only — it's a mass noun, so you don't pluralise it. And remember चाय already means "tea"; saying "chai tea" is, in Hindi, just saying "tea tea".