You’re at a fancy banquet — maybe your boss is sitting next to you.  The crowded dinner table holds a dizzying array of china, crystal, cutlery, flatware, coffee cups…  The list can be endless. 

You may be faced with two potential scenarios:

• You’re the first to sit down and you aren’t quite sure which napkin is yours, which butter plate belongs to you and maybe even where your coffee cup is.
• If you’re the last to sit down, you might find that someone got the whole thing started wrong and you are faced with the same dilemma — what belongs to you?

The answer is quite simple — and if you remember this, you’ll eliminate any hesitation:  Eat Left, Drink Right.  Bread and butter to the left; coffee, water and wine to the right.  Often your napkin is under your fork or on your plate, but if your napkin has been placed (decoratively) in your coffee cup, it is to the right — because you drink coffee.

There are other gimmicks to help us remember which is which, but I find a simple Eat Left, Drink Right does the trick every time.

What other banquet etiquette dilemmas have you faced?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 at 4:30 am and is filed under Business Etiquette. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.