What does “食lunch” mean in Cantonese?

Hong Kong Cantonese drops English words into a sentence and gives them Cantonese grammar. 食lunch (sik6 lunch) means “to have lunch”: the verb is Cantonese 食 (eat), the noun is English. You’ll hear 食breakfast and 食dinner too, and English nouns take Cantonese measure words and place words like any other noun. Nobody hears this as broken Cantonese. It is how people in Hong Kong talk every day.

In this entertainment-news clip the voiceover says the actress 湯怡 was spotted 著住美容師嘅制服 去食lunch, going for lunch in a beautician’s uniform. She explains she had been at 我朋友嗰間clinic度, “at my friend’s clinic”: the English noun clinic sits between 嗰間 (that, with the measure word for shops and buildings) and 度 (dou6, “at, the place”). Standard written Chinese would say 吃午飯 and 診所 here. The subtitles of most Hong Kong videos switch to those forms, so the English words are often missing from the text even though you hear them.