This study investigates the realization of Material processes in English and Vietnamese restaurant reviews from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), with particular reference to Halliday’s Transitivity system. Drawing on a corpus of 300 five-star restaurant reviews (150 English and 150 Vietnamese) collected from TripAdvisor, the research examines how experiential meaning is constructed through action-oriented language in evaluative discourse. A total of 1,544 Material clauses were identified and analyzed in terms of process subtypes (Doing vs. Happening), participant roles, and clause configurations. The findings reveal that Material processes constitute a major proportion of experiential meaning in both languages, reflecting the central role of concrete actions in representing dining experiences. While both English and Vietnamese display broadly similar distributions, notable differences emerge: Vietnamese reviews show a stronger preference for Doing clauses with explicit Actor–Goal configurations, whereas English reviews employ a higher proportion of Happening clauses, often backgrounding agency. These contrasts are interpreted in relation to typological differences between the two languages and genre-specific communicative purposes. The study contributes to contrastive functional linguistics and offers practical implications for discourse analysis, translation, and language pedagogy.