RIBBON

Tonight I won a blue ribbon for best speaker (at HOD Toastmasters Speakers' club). I'm really pleased. 

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It was for my talk on 

Restaurant Etiquette - tips for owners and diners.

I started by calling for a member of the audience to volunteer be a diner. I began laying a table. 

I asked him to wait. He immediately started to confront me about why the restaurant wasn't ready. (Laughter.)

I put the plate and cup and saucer and knives and forks in from of him. Said he could sit down. 

I went back to the lectern - which I moved aside.

I showed my book Etiquette for Every Occasion (in a book stand) and said,

" My book was a best seller and it told you about dinner table etiquette in England and the world. 

I'm going to tell you about the etiquette you should watch out for in a restaurant and in your home. 

Etiquette at meal times is different around the world - even knives and forks. For example everybody in England knows you would put the knife on the right and the fork on the left with the tines up. But in France you put the tines down. It's so you can see the silver mark on the back, - in this case the stainless steel mark - and show you don't care about scratching the polished table top because you are so rich.

Nowadays in England service has got very slopping. I often start by asking for a cup of coffee. The server often puts the cup down with the handle on the left. I'm right-handed like most people. I shouldn't have to turn the cup around. The same applies to a jug of water. I don't expect to have to reach across my glass of champagne and knock it over trying to swing the jug handle from one side to the other. In fact I shouldn't need to pour out the water at all. the server should be pouring out the drinks.

Another thing which annoys me is when they appear with a fish knife and steak knife and a soup spoon and ask who ordered what so they can give us the correct cutlery. They should know who ordered what. 

The first time I saw this done correctly was at a castle hotel, a pousada in (Estoril) Portugal. I was with a group of travel writers and local dignitaries, probably the mayor.  About twelve of us were sitting at a round table and the servers knew what each person was having. I asked them how they remembered. They treated the table as a clockface, starting with twelve at the wall. So you take the orders from one to twelve in order, or draw those numbers on the writing pad and fill in the orders from which whichever place you start. 

Imagine if the President of the United States is having a state dinner with The Head of Russia or China. They are deciding to start World War Three  - or stop it. You can't have them being interrupted by a waiter asking, 'Excuse me, which of you ordered the steak?'

So long as you progress clockwise around the table, even if you made a mistake once, you can't get it wrong more than once. If you know that the man who ordered the fish came before the man who ordered steak, then if the man who orders fish is not 1 but two, the man who order steak is next to him and so on round the table.  

With just a table for two it's even easier. You only have to write M for male and F for female, so you can see that the male ordered steak and the female ordered the fish. (Aside.) You wouldn't even need the letter M. It's usually the man who orders steak. (Laughter.) 

Of course it's different in China and Japan where they eat with chopsticks. They don't give diners knives. The reason is that the diners might stab each other. Instead the food is cut up into cubes in the kitchen. So that the kitchen staff can stab each other. (Laughter.)

You have to be careful not to leave your chopsticks standing up in the rice. The Chinese leave chopsticks upright at funeral dinners so their dead ancestors can enjoy the meal.  You would not want the restaurant or the guests to think you were having dinner with your dead ancestors.

To show you finished a meal, you put your knife and fork together. To show you are still eating, you leave them apart, A line. 

That way the server doesn't keep going up to the king or president or courting couple and asking, 'Have you finished?'

If you get up from a meal and leave your knife and fork together it shows you've finished and you might come back and find the plate gone. If you left your knife and form A shape, the waiter should leave your food on the table for you. If you get back and find the food cleared away, although the knife and fork are left A shape, you might be annoyed.

END

I'll end with a story about how you complain about food. In the UK we hate to complain. Americans like to complain, but they are diplomatic. President Lincoln was presented with a cup of coffee and he said, ''If this is coffee, bring me tea. If this is tea, bring me coffee.''  

I have that quotation on my restaurant reviews on my webpage.

www.annalondon8googlepages.com

You can also see my restaurant reviews on Trusted Places. I have written 75 reviews. More than 3,000 people have read my profile. Over 18,000 have read my restaurant reviews.

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Afterwards members of the audience asked me to show them how to use chopsticks. I demonstrated using two pens.

One person said, 'We go out regularly as a group to restaurants. Often the person sitting at position six will swap places with the person at position four. Later in the meal they will swap back again. How does a server cope with that!'

I intend to do this for a video soon. I shall show my ribbon and the plaque which is passed on to the winner each month.

Meanwhile, you can see videos of me on You Tube.  Type in 'Angela Lansbury Author'.  You'll see an introduction to me and parts one and two of the Comic Poetry readings.

Angela