The AML Group --Etiquette and Protocol Consultants

Style of Eating: Continental

• There's no need to apologize for the way you eat unless you don't know how to manipulate your knife and fork with assurance.

• It's difficult to close a deal if you don't know where to place your knife and fork know when you're finished eating, or if you're worried about which utensil to use.

• There are two styles of eating: Continental, which we will focus on, and American Style.

• Europeans were as right handed with forks as Americans until the 1840's, until the fashionable upper class stopped shifting their forks back and forth.

• It first became fashionable in Europe but in1853, a French etiquette book confided, "If you wish to eat in the latest mode favored by fashionable people, you will not change your fork to your right hand after you have cut your meat, but raise it to your mouth in your left hand." And that's how the so called 'Continental Style' originated.

• With the fork placed in the left hand and the knife in the right, food is pushed onto the fork with their knife and conveyed to the mouth with the fork, tines down.

• Creamed foods and slippery foods such as peas are eaten with the fork's tines up.

• They cross their forks and knives on the plate with the fork in the left hand side placed over the knife on the right with the fork prongs pointed down.

• When we're resting in between bites and when we finish this style of dining, we place both knives and forks on the right side of the plate in the 4 o'clock or 12:20 position. Knife on top, fork below, blade inside.

Finished!

• A good waiter will never remove a plate with the knife and fork crossed as this indicates you're not finished.

• In the Continental Style of dining, when you finish a course, whatever utensil was meant for that course - whether you used them or not - go on the plate in the finished position, both knife and fork. If you don’t put it on the plate, the wait staff will.

• What's important to remember is whichever style you choose is to be consistent for the duration of the meal. Don't switch back and forth between the two styles. What you begin with, you must end with. Remember balance.