Describe a café or restaurant you like going to
Food, atmosphere and habit all in one card — no shortage of material, so the risk is drift.
The cue card
Describe a café or restaurant you like going to.
You should say
- where it is
- who you usually go with
- what you normally have there
- and explain why you keep going back
1 minute to prepare · up to 2 minutes to speak
How to fill the two minutes
Four beats, not four answers. The prompts on the card are a scaffold — a turn that flows past them scores better than four disconnected replies.
- Where it is and what kind of place it is — size, style, how long it's been there.
- What you order, and whether it's always the same thing.
- The atmosphere and the people — staff who recognise you, the noise level, who else goes.
- Why you keep going back when there are other options.
Vocabulary this card invites
Lexical Resource is a quarter of your band, and band 7 explicitly allows the occasional wrong word — playing it safe with plain vocabulary is what keeps people at 6.
a regular
for someone who goes often — 'I'm something of a regular'
family-run
precise and evocative in one word
generous portions
the standard collocation
cosy
for small and warm; note it's positive where 'cramped' isn't
we always end up there
shows habit naturally
reasonably priced
better register than 'cheap'
The trap on this card
Describing the menu at length and never the place or the people.
The card says you like going there. Half your answer should be about the experience of being in the room.
A band 8 answer, and why it works
Read this to see the moves, not to learn the words. An examiner hears memorised answers every working day and it shows up in your fluency score — the hesitation pattern of someone reciting is nothing like the pattern of someone thinking. The details below are invented; yours should be your own.
The place I'd describe is a small Vietnamese restaurant about ten minutes from my office that seats maybe twenty people and has been run by the same family since the nineties. There's no decor to speak of — strip lighting, laminated menus, a television on mute in the corner permanently showing football. The food is exceptional and absurdly cheap, which is the main reason I go, but it isn't the reason I keep going. What keeps me going is that the mother who runs the front has decided, without consulting me, what I like. I stopped ordering about two years ago. I sit down and food arrives. Occasionally it's something I'd never have chosen and it's always better than what I would have picked. I take people there when I want to impress them in a way that doesn't look like trying. I'd be genuinely upset if it closed, and given how little they charge I do worry about that.
What earns the band
- 'Has decided, without consulting me, what I like' is dry, specific and funny — the kind of detail that could only come from a real place.
- It separates the obvious reason from the real reason, giving the answer a two-part structure instead of a list of features.
- The final worry adds emotional weight without any stated emotion word, which is a much stronger move than saying 'I love it very much'.
What Part 3 asks next
Part 3 is loosely tied to your long turn, but the questions turn abstract — about people in general rather than about you. This card usually leads into:
- how eating habits have changed in your country
- whether eating out is becoming more or less common
- the social role of shared meals
Other places cards
Describe a place you like to spend your free time.
A description card where the marks come from the atmosphere, not the floor plan.
Describe a crowded place you have been to.
A sensory card. The crowd itself is the subject, and describing it well is most of the score.
Describe a quiet place you like to go to.
The mirror of the crowded-place card, and harder — you have to describe an absence.
Describe a city you have visited.
Broad enough that the risk is a shapeless list of sights rather than a shortage of material.
Describe a building you find interesting.
The card that most rewards actual descriptive vocabulary — shape, material, scale, age.
Describe a park or garden you like.
An easy card to answer adequately and a hard one to answer memorably — the difference is season and time of day.
Speak this one out loud
Oliver will read you a card, wait out your preparation minute, and then say nothing at all for two minutes — which is the part you cannot rehearse alone. The report afterwards scores fluency, vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation separately. The first test is free.
This guide is written from the published IELTS Speaking band descriptors, in our own words. For the official wording, see the British Council's band descriptors. MockLive AI is an independent practice tool and is not affiliated with IELTS, the British Council, IDP or Cambridge University Press & Assessment.