Boulevard Saint-Joseph, à Montréal [mars 2016]
In a shop in Montréal, two customers left without buying anything. On their way out, the saleslady asked them in French an equivalent of you didn’t find anything you liked?
Can you guess how she might have asked this?
She didn’t use the verb aimer.
She didn’t used the verb plaire, either.
But she did use the noun gôut. More specifically, she used the expression à votre goût, meaning to your liking. Can you make a guess now?
Here’s what she said:
Vous avez rien trouvé à vot’ goût?
You didn’t find anything you liked?
(You didn’t find anything to your liking?)
Remember, ne is omitted in spoken language; rather than vous n’avez rien trouvé, you’ll hear vous avez rien trouvé.
Votre was pronounced colloquially as vot’, which sounds like the French word vote.
Let’s look now at the question in the title.
In a restaurant, a waiter or waitress might ask you:
Est-ce que c’est à votre goût?
Everything good? ok?
(Is it to your liking?)
In this case, you’re being asked if you like the dish that’s been served to you.
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Four years of French and i never knew ne was omitted in spoken French.
“Ne” is deleted well over 99% of the time in spoken French. (At least this is true in Quebec. I don’t have actual figures for France.) Some French teachers might not want to tell their students this because they want you to learn “proper” formal French. Actually, if you ask French speakers, many will insist that they don’t delete the “ne” because they think that only lazy people would do that and that it’s a recent phenomenon. Old recordings from the middle of the last century showed that even people born in the 1880s did it just as often as young people today.
Thanks much for commenting! It’s nice to know these things about a language i spent so much time on.
This is why asking people directly how things are said often results in less-than-accurate answers. Better to listen to what people say spontaneously and model yourself on that as best you can.
Ten years in Montreal, and this is the first time I realized that « goût » in this phrase doesn’t literally refer to taste. I mostly hear it in restaurants, and just assumed the waiters were asking me if everything tasted good.
Do you also know the expression avoir le goût (de faire quelque chose)? It means to want (to do something). For example, j’ai le goût de partir en voyage means I want to go on a trip, I feel like going on a trip. J’ai pas l’goût means I don’t want to.
Juste comme ça, comment ça se dirait en France ?? Une fois j’étais à déjeuner avec une amie française au Saint-Hub sur St-Denis et la serveuse nous avait demandé si le tout était à notre goût.. Ce à quoi on a répondu oui normalement. Pis Céline (la Française) a répété (après que la serveuse soit partie bien-sûr) sur ton un peu charmé « Est-ce que c’est à votre goût.. Ils disent ça au Québec »
Alors moi quand elle a dit ça, j’ai essayé de me rappeler comment les serveurs en France nous posaient cette question car franchement il n’y avait rien d’étonnant dans ce que la serveuse québécoise nous a dit !
How is this asked in France? I don’t remember French servers asking us anything « weird » about how our experience was going. The reason this shocked me is because while dining at a St-Hubert on la rue Saint-Denis with my French friend, the waitress asked us this question and that surprised her lol. So I’m sure I asked how this was said in French, but I don’t remember her answer, but I didn’t find it shocking. Idk, maybe I’m just weird.
C’est une pratique américaine. En Europe, les serveurs ne posent pas ce genre de questions pendant le repas…