At Table

You do not need to know which fork is for fish. You need to know how to sit at a table and not embarrass yourself, which is a lower bar than it sounds and one that a remarkable number of men fail to clear.

What follows covers napkins, pace, the telephone, posture, and cutlery: the minimum required to eat in the company of others without making it worse for them.

The full table setting I was trained to lay was a genuinely beautiful thing: logical, functional, refined over generations so that a meal of many courses might proceed without confusion or hesitation. Gone from common use, I have made what peace I can with this, and some days the peace holds. But the principles beneath it, the reasons a table was set with care, have not expired simply because the silver service has. Those principles were never about formality for its own sake. They were about consideration: someone had thought, in advance, about how to make the meal pleasant for everyone at the table. That is all good manners have ever been, and the fact that you are eating from a single plate with a single fork does not excuse you from the obligation to think about the people sitting near you.

The napkin goes in your lap the moment you sit down. Not on the table; not tucked into your collar unless you are under the age of six. When you leave the table temporarily, the napkin goes on your chair. When the meal is finished, it goes to the left of your plate, loosely folded. These are small things. They are visible things. And the man who does them without thinking about them has already distinguished himself from the man who leaves his napkin balled beside his water glass like a piece of evidence.

Do not begin eating until everyone at the table has been served, or until the host has begun, whichever comes first. This is not a rule of etiquette; it is a consideration, and the distinction matters. The person who has not yet received their food should not be made to watch you eat yours. The few minutes of patience this requires are not a hardship to any man whose self-control extends beyond the purely theoretical.

Eat at the pace of the table, not at your own. If you are a fast eater, slow down. If you are a slow eater, attend to business. A meal is a shared activity; the man who finishes while others are still on their first course has, by his haste, transformed a communal experience into a spectator event, with himself cast in the uncomfortable role of audience to other people’s chewing. This is disagreeable for all parties and easily avoided.

Do not speak with food in your mouth. One should not need to say this, and one resents that it requires saying, and yet one has eaten in enough establishments of your era to know that the frequency with which it is ignored is matched only by the confidence with which the offenders proceed, as though the visibility of partially masticated food were not a matter of concern to anyone seated within range.

On the subject of the telephone at table: remove it from the table entirely. Not face down, which still announces its presence and your attachment to it. Remove it to your pocket or your bag. The telephone on a dining table is the modern equivalent of reading a newspaper at breakfast, which was considered rude in my day and which at least had the defence of containing information worth reading.

Sit upright. The rule against elbows on the table was never the rigid prohibition that people suppose; it was a practical instruction to prevent a man from hunching over his plate like a dog defending a bone. You may rest your forearms on the edge between courses. The principle, which is that one should eat with some semblance of posture, is more important than the specific location of the elbow at any given moment.

If there is more than one fork, use them from the outside in. If there is only one fork, you have been spared the decision entirely. The knife remains in your dominant hand if you are cutting, the fork in the other. You may eat in the manner favoured across the Atlantic, setting the knife down and switching the fork across, or you may eat in the Continental style, keeping each implement in its hand throughout; the point is not which tradition you follow but that you follow one of them with enough consistency that you do not appear to be improvising.

These are basics. They require no special knowledge, no period costume, and no acquaintance with a fish fork. They require only that you sit down to a meal with the understanding that eating in the company of others is a social act, governed by the same principle that governs every other social act in this guide: make the people around you more comfortable, not less.