h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What I've been taught by my folks is that if you're a group of people going out to eat, or if you've got a dinner party with a few friends, you should NEVER start eating before everyone has been served IF your party is less than 7 people. If you're more than 7 people it's okay to just start digging in as soon as you get your food, cause if you don't, it can go cold and that's not something you want.
An exception to this rule, though, is soups. Soups you can start eating as soon as it gets placed in front of you.

Comments? Objections?

There are some people in the States who follow this rule, and after observing it for a time, many of us just decided it was stupid. When one dish is being held up in the kitchen, everyone stares around the table and feels awkward until that dish is delivered, and meanwhile, the food is getting cold. Nowadays, if someone's food is delayed, they can munch on something around the table, depending on the type of restaurant... bread rolls, bread sticks, chips & salsa, a couple of french fries off someone else's plate, etc. But then, Americans as a rule have a very casual approach to just about everything, and dining out is no exception. You'll still see people with food in front of them maintaining the silent vigil, but not at my table.

The States are, of course, a varied place, and rules vary from person to person. There are only a few hard and fast rules that everyone must observe... the rest are considered optional:

- Don't reach over anyone else's plate, and don't lunge for anything that isn't within easy reach. Your neighbors will be only too happy to pass things to you.

- Eat over your plate. This one's more of a fashion tip than a politeness one.

- Don't be disgusting. (Rude noises, nauseating discussion topics, etc.)

- Left-handers must take precautions to ensure they don't sit to the right of a right-handed eater. Nobody likes to play elbow jousting with a fork in their mouth.

- Don't be a miser when the check arrives. If someone offers to pay, that's okay, but otherwise, lay out the price of your meal, plus some extra for the tip. People who try to freeload don't get asked out again. Don't get anal over change you're due to receive, either, if it's only a couple of bucks.

After that, anything goes. Put the napkin on your lap? If you eat over your plate, you won't need to. Elbows off the table? My guess is this originated in the Medieval days when the table was likely to be covered in filth. As long as you don't set them in a puddle, you're fine. Besides, if God didn't want our elbows on the table, then why did he make tables a perfect elbow-height?

If one dish gets held up in the kitchen, the restaurant is not suposed to serve the other dishes until it is ready, thus eliminating the problem with people having to sit around with a plate of food in front of them, just waiting for that one dish. Of course, any good restaurant wouln't serve the other dishes, but these days, one never knows.

An informal meal at home, though, usually starts with everyone grabbing what they feel like as soon as it's set forth on the table, and then it's free for all.

How about chicken, then? I grew up being told that chicken is the only thing you are allowed to eat with your fingers in a restaurant (a friend told me that in Gainesville, Georgia, USA there's a local law that states that it is illegal to eat chicken using a fork). Anyone know if that goes for ribs as well, cause they can get a bit hard to eat with a knife and fork.

I've seen people try to eat chicken on the bone with a fork, and they just end up looking stupid, and eventually put their cutlery away. Boneless chicken calls for a fork... unless it's in the form of chicken strips. Confused? Basic rule of thumb is that if it seems appropriate to use your hands, use your hands. There's a whole slew of things that need picking up, from tacos to chicken strips to crab legs to french fries to sandwiches to....

Of course you're right that there's a lot of stuff you can eat with your hands. Just that chicken (on the bone, then) was the only thing I was indoctrinated with into being allowed to eat with my fingers at a restaurant. Nowadays there's KFC, BK, McD's where you have to eat using your fingers, but those are not the kinds of establishments I was referring to. I was thinking about such places where you occasionally have to book a table and they have cutlery and napkins and stuff laid out as you get there.

BTW, when did you make the transission over to Col. Sellers? I don't recall you calling yourself Col. Sellers this morning, when I replied to your previous post on this matter....

I've eaten at such fancy places and used my fingers to eat bbq ribs - it seemed fine at the time. *shrug*.

That's what I thought.. But then again, who would really order BBQ ribs at a formal dinner anyways? I would definitely think twice before doing that. BUt that's beside the point here.

Well - if it's on the menu...

You changed my name, actually.

Forums are no longer kept online all the time, but are cached to disk. That file no longer gets tampered with until someone updates the forum. So, since I changed my name yesterday morning, it started appearing in newly updated forums. After you posted your message, my name was updated here. Just another of the new things to get used to in the new programming.

Back on the subject of finger food, you can get a sandwich and fries at a lot of sit-down restaurants, usually called "family restaurants." You can still get finger foods at more formal places, especially if you order shellfsh. Nobody can disect a crab leg with any sort of decorum.

If soups and deserts are served cold you are expected to wait until everyone is served. Only if hot does the rule of soups apply.

You are, of course, correct about the crab legs, Colonel. Noone can eat crabs legs, or any type of shellfish, using regular tools, such as knife and fork.

Actually, it can easily be done. I've never found much use for the cracking tool, myself, since the shell would have to be much more brittle than it usually is to make itself useful. I snap apart the joints with my hands, and then use a fork to split the shell along its length. What I meant is that this procedure cannot be performed with any measure of propriety and decorum, so it is best to fling these onto the same plate you place your discarded shells. Newcomers to shellfish will inevitably spray meat bits into their hair, and make rude sucking noises on one end of a particularly stubborn section.

Even so, you're not really using the regular tools for what they are more or less intended to. And you still have to use your hands to some extent to get the job done.
Crawfish eating is a chapter all to itself. I got a tip from a friend in New Orleans that one shouldn't bother with trivialities such as the claws, since one gets so little meat for the effort to break into the shell.

Crawfish eating is simple: break off the tail, suck the meat, discard, repeat.

Having been raised in the southern US I am forced to disagree with the crawfish eating technique as the sum total of crawfish etiquette. In most prats of the south there will be at least one kind of sauce to dip the meat of the crawfish in and it is considered mildly impolite (very few things are considered seriously impolite when eating crawfish) to remove the meat you have sucked out of the tail from your mouth to dip it in something.

What I've found works well is breaking the tail off, inverting it so that the underside faces up, prying outward with your thumbs on the first section of shell so that it seperates itself while leaving the meat, and pulling the meat free. This also has the added benefit of enabling you to remove the intestinal tract and flick it off in the grass. A note here should state that crawfish feasts are traditionaly held outdoors as they get quite messy if you have several hundred pounds of crawfish. Large ammounts of alcohol are the appropriate drink at a crawfish feast, with frozen drinks or beer being the best choice, but never wine of any sort.