Provecho

What it means

A short wish over somebody's food. Provecho is benefit, so the phrase is may it do you good - and it is said at the start of a meal, in the middle of one, or on your way past somebody else's.

The social range is the surprising part. It is not reserved for people you know. Strangers at the next table, a colleague you have never spoken to, a family eating on the sidewalk outside a fonda - all of them get it, and none of them find it odd.

Provecho is benefit or gain, straight from Latin profectus. The verb aprovechar is derived from it rather than the reverse, which is why Spain's que aproveche and Mexico's provecho are the same wish said from two ends of one word. The same root turns nasty in aprovechado - a freeloader, somebody who takes advantage.

Mexico shortened it. Buen provecho exists and is a shade more formal, but bare provecho is the everyday form and provechito - the diminutive - is warmer still.

How Mexicans use it

On the way out is where a visitor meets it first. Leaving a restaurant, you say provecho to the tables you pass, quietly, without stopping. Nobody looks up for long and nobody thinks it strange.

At a shared table it opens the meal. Somebody says it before anybody starts, and in a lot of families nobody picks up a fork until they have.

In an office kitchen it works as both hello and goodbye around food. Arriving where people are eating, leaving while they still are - either way it is the thing you say.

Waiters say it when they set the plate down - provecho, buen provecho, or que lo disfruten - and the answer is gracias. That is the version you will hear most often and the easiest one to practice.

Common mistake

Saying nothing. This is the actual error, and it is the one visitors make for months - in a fonda, a market, an office kitchen or at a family table, walking past somebody's food in silence reads as slightly cold, and the fix costs one word.

The exception is worth knowing because it is a live argument in Mexico. In a formal restaurant in a moneyed part of CDMX the custom thins out, some chilangos consider saying it to strangers slightly naco, and Mexican etiquette writers argue against it outright - the objection being that it forces a reply out of somebody with food in their mouth. Tables there go past each other in silence. Everywhere else, silence is the odd choice.

Treating it as an interruption. It does not ask for a response beyond gracias and it does not start a conversation. Somebody saying provecho as they pass is not opening anything, and answering with a full sentence is more disruptive than the word was.