All of the tasting menus I’ve had in this are have had utensils placed just before they were needed. Every day is something different, and not everyone has the same courses, so it’s easier to start with something simple, such as a bread plate and a knife for the butter, and that’s it.
At other restaurants, if I order fish, the waitstaff will remove the dinner knife and add a fish knife (not really a knife). Similarly, if I choose soup instead of salad, the salad fork will be replaced with a soup spoon.
Our setting had a lot more utensils than this. The one pictured doesn’t seem to have specialized fish forks, say. In real the waiters would add utensils if the menu called for it, but for the show they could either design the menu so this wasn’t necessary or not show the new utensils to reduce the need to shoot around the extras playing waiters.
Nitpick:
The footman answered the door and escorted visitors to where they needed to go. He often dressed in an 18th Century costume, with tailcoat, culottes, silk stockings, and buckled shoes. Footmen were the most expensive, and usually the first to be laid off in a budget cut.
A valet tended to guests in their bedrooms, making sure their clothes were ready and their shoes shined.
A waiter served at the meals. (Often the footman and the valets doubled as waiters.)
The butler supervised all of the lower-ranking servants. In a large estate, there might be one butler supervising the living quarters, and another butler supervising the kitchen and dining room. If the employer was really ostentatious, the wine cellar might have its own butler.
On the distaff side, a Housekeeper supervised a group of Maids. (The maids often doubled as waitresses.)
Affected gentility is a mark of being ill at ease. But a deviation from the normal may mean any one of a number of things. Suppose — to illustrate — that a hostess notices one of her guests eating her pudding with a spoon. She may think that no fork has been put at the woman’s disposal and that, being very polite, she preferred to risk ridicule rather than to call attention to her hostess’s oversight. Or the guest may belong to some sect that believes God does not want us to eat pudding with a fork. Or she may not know any better. Or she may be a real, flat-heeled aristocrat who eats pudding any way she damn well pleases and happens that day to damn well please to eat it with a spoon. But certainly if the guest were in all other ways attractive, intelligent, and poised, the hostess would not be warranted, on the basis of this one peculiarity, in assuming that her guest had no knowledge of the ways of cultivated people.
Agree about the footman conducting visitors, often under the direction of the butler. In some houses the butler himself answers the door.
Also true, with the caveat that many guests brought their own valets (and female guests brought their own lady’s maids to look after their hair and clothes). A valet-less guest might be valeted by the host’s own valet, by a butler or footman, or even by a parlormaid, depending on the opulence or modesty of the establishment.
Here I part company with you to some extent. To the best of my knowledge, a private household, at least according to the conventions of early 20th-century wealthy Anglo-American society, did not have a staffing category called “waiters”. You are correct that footmen, supervised by the butler, did the waiting at table, but their job category was “footmen”. (An especially large party might include temporary staff from a local caterer or restaurant, and those people were indeed called waiters.)
A guest’s own valet would not be roped in to wait at the host’s table with the host’s own staff. But in cases where the host’s own footmen valeted guests, I suppose that could be described as valets serving at table. Generally speaking, though, they’re all just called footmen unless they have specialized responsibilities outside the realm of footman duties, such as chauffeurs and gardeners, etc.
I remember reading somewhere that a true gentleman, when he sees a guest at his table using the wrong fork, promptly starts using the same fork himself so as not to embarrass his guest.
I think it was Mrs. Philander Knox who (supposedly) deliberately overturned the entire soup tureen because one guest had spilled a drop of his own, no doubt putting him and all the other guests at perfect ease.
Well, except that if everyone on the road doesn’t follow the same set of rules, it results in crashes, explosions, deaths, all sorts of mayhem. Whereas if everyone at the dining room table doesn’t follow the same set of rules, there’s zero fallout besides the shock of the people who believe in the rules. Driving rules are required for safe driving. Etiquette rules are not required for safe dining.
There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection IS the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances can the food be omitted.
Depends on which rule they aren’t following. Whether everyone uses the fork to the right of their plate or the one to their left is arbitrary and doesn’t matter as long as everyone follows the same rules. But it does cause a little bit of fall-out when one person next to me takes the fork to their right and the other takes the one to their left, leaving me without a fork until we locate an extra one (most likely clear across the table).
Yeah, or if the guest next to you starts blowing their nose loudly and repeatedly, or brushing their hair, or cutting their nails or some other too-personal thing that Miss Manners readers would know they’d want to leave the table to do.
Well, up to a point. This sort of reasoning is often used to justify expressing disdain for etiquette, with the implication that the disdainer is a more tolerant large-minded type of independent thinker than all those easily shocked narrow etiquette conformists who “believe in the rules”.
But it doesn’t really land, because nobody AFAICT is actually trying to argue that etiquette rules about table manners are as vital to the immediate health and safety of their users as traffic laws are. Nobody is claiming that following table-manners etiquette is just as important and necessary as following traffic laws.
However, that doesn’t mean that not following them is guaranteed to have “zero fallout” other than maybe shocking some prune-faced dowagers. As doreen and Briny_Deep noted, there are a lot of potential mismatches in table-manners etiquette that can result in significantly inconveniencing and/or discomforting some or all of the parties involved. Not to any extent that’s anywhere near as bad as getting killed or maimed in a traffic accident, sure. But is that really the baseline level of what you consider “fallout”?
For example, you probably don’t consider yourself a prune-faced dowager, but nonetheless you probably wouldn’t enjoy it if a dining partner threw their half-chewed bite of meat on the floor, blew their nose on the tablecloth, licked their plate at the table, or drank out of your glass. All of those behaviors were normal at some point in the evolution of (Western) table manners.
Even if you think of yourself as more open-minded than those who “believe in the rules” etiquette-wise, you’re probably glad that almost everybody currently follows “the rules” that prohibit such behaviors. If you were sharing a company meal with somebody who didn’t follow them, I doubt you’d be inclined to describe the consequences as “zero fallout”.
