I'm questioning myself whether it should be in ein Restaurant.. but I think as I am using 'essen' I should use the dative and say 'in einem Restaurant' ?
Thank you in advance, I find this forum really helpful
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Sign up to join this communityI'm questioning myself whether it should be in ein Restaurant.. but I think as I am using 'essen' I should use the dative and say 'in einem Restaurant' ?
Thank you in advance, I find this forum really helpful
The German "in" with accusative basically means the English "into", while the German "in" with dative means the English "in".
You can go into a restaurant: "in ein Restaurant gehen".
You can run into a restaurant: "in ein Restaurant rennen".
However, you don't eat into a restaurant, you eat in a restaurant, so in German, the dative case is correct: "in einem Restaurant essen".
To put it in a more abstract form: "in" + accusative denotes direction, "in" + dative denotes place.
If you begin the sentence with "danach", your verb and subject swap places:
Danach könnten wir in einem Restaurant essen.
Both sentences are correct. They just have slightly different meanings.
Wir gehen in einem Restaurant essen
answers the question: "Where will you eat?" - "We will eat in a restaurant".
Wir gehen in ein Restaurant essen
answers the question: "Where will you go to eat?" - "We will go to a restaurant"
As the other answers have pointed out, your use of the Dativ is correct and mandatory in this sentence.
However there is another possibility, with a little change:
Danach könnten wir in ein Restaurant, essen.
This basically translates to "Afterwards we could go into a restaurant, to eat."
But in this case specifying what you want to do in a restaurant other than eating isn't really necessary. A more reasonable use-case would be "Danach könnten wir in den Park, picknicken." because otherwise it was not inherently clear what you want to do in the park.
In German, common positional prepositions "in"/"auf"/"an" are two-way prepositions. This means they lead accusitive when indicating direction, but dative when indicating location.
The last sentence requires clarification: a two-way preposition leads accusitive, when the subject ("wir" in your example) and the object ("restaurant") changed their relative positions, from non-contact to contact (or contact to non-contact) from a bird's eye view.
Whereas a two-way preposition leads dative, when the subject ("wir" in your example) and the object ("restaurant") do not change their relative positions. They either stay non-contact, or stay in physical contact, from a bird's eye view.
Note that you can eating and running everywhere within the restaurant, and it's still dative.