To think these are correct table manners or am I just a snob??

[Justintime3]

I was raised with strict table manners, yet I have never been sat at a table with anyone who has the same table manners I do! Are these over the top?

This is what I was taught

1. Do not eat until the person who cooked sits down (excused if the chef says you can start)
2. Do not eat until everyone has their food in a restaurant (excused if the person without their food says you can start)
3. Chew with your mouth closed and do not speak with your mouth full
4. Do not take calls or use your phone at the table. Excuse yourself if you need to
5. Put your knife and fork together at the front of your plate when you are finished
6. Offer the last serving of XYZ to the table before you take it
7. Thank the person who cooked and offer to clean up
8. Elbows off the table
9. Tear bread into small chunks to eat in a restaurant, don't bite off the whole roll

10. Use cutlery correctly

• index finger on top of your knife and fork
• spoons for soup and dessert only. Spoon the soup from the farthest side of the bowl
• load food onto the back of the fork with your knife. (No 'shovelling' as my mum called it)

My mum's always been really strict on it and is the type to point out people's bad table manners so I've always followed these to a T. Thoughts? Is this over the top and I'm a snob, or are these just normal to expect?

Because of how I've been raised I can't help but be put off when I see someone without these manners.

Just keen to see how others were raised!

Good table manners
Not a snob, not unreasonable

I have the same issues with the knife and fork, I really struggle. My ex boyfriend announced loudly in a restaurant that I hold my knife and fork funny but DH just accepts it. I'm now worrying what other people think though!

You well know that these are basic manners...this isn't an AIBU though is it? You're not genuinely wondering anything? You just want to come across as superior.
Actually, those are basic and not exactly snobby, so you failed there...actually, it's almost as though you're trying too hard to convince others you understand basic etiquette...oh dear

If you have a hobby whereby you like to make it deliberately difficult to use cutlery, in a way that it clearly isn't intended - and brush off your odd proclivity to others by claiming that it's 'good manners' - why stop at just balancing food on the back of your fork?

Why not use your spoon to cut your steak, or chop sticks to eat soup? Maybe pretentious restaurants that go for this kind of theme could also fit a trapeze above each table, so you can show off your dextrous skills to everybody to the max. All explained as 'just good manners', of course.

Agreed. There's a very unattractive smug note coming through from people who skim read the first few points on OP's list and jumped in to say 'basic good manners!

I think there are also people who read the first couple and then just think "this is a good, polite person - just like me" without bothering to look further at the nuttier, pointless, often ableist and discriminatory items further down.

Eating pizza with knife and fork….psychopath 😂

@beccahamlet cutlery at twenty past four indicates “I would like more please “. (Trained silver service waitress and worked in posh houses here)
cutlery at half past six is “finished ready for you to remove my plate, thank you “.
anywhere else the person is either an overseas visitor or unaware of appropriate etiquette.

In what way, exactly, does how someone else eat affect you? Aside from mouth open & chewing or eating noisily, how does it impact your enjoyment?

I suspect it doesn't at all &, in fact, your enjoyment comes from judging others as inferior to you.

Obviously the rules are for formal dining and for most European cuisine. Pasta needs a spoon and fork- spoon to twiddle on and fork to eat from.
Rice and curry- depending on the company and cuisine requires chopsticks (never leave them in the bowl and certainly never point down in the rice) bread and the right hand (never left) or knife and fork, using the rice to allow the sauce to stick to the back of the fork.

I think it's also worth noting the difference that once would have existed between eating for sustenance and eating as part of a social act. Back when all this was invented, the higher classes had plenty to eat. Eating wasn't about getting it down your neck to sustain you for the intense physical labour of your life.
Manners related to cutlery, etc, were driven by appearance. In a very simplified version, it was showing you had enough to eat and didn't need it for mere sustenance, but for pleasure, but that's over-simplistic.
Working class people didn't eat in company like those in classes above did. They didn't go to restaurants, not did they dress in different clothes just for dinner every evening. Formal dinners Downton Abbey style weren't quick. They had the time to eat more slowly. The food was of a richer nature, the kind of stuff you don't want to eat huge amounts of. You take your time appreciating it whilst not looking like you haven't eaten in weeks.
Back of the fork slows you down, as people have mentioned. You aren't so hungry, you need to get it in.
Manners were for people for whom eating served more purpose than sustenance. This manner of eating became more common in the working classes when social mobility became more possible, and people wanted to 'appear' to have more than they did. This is why so many of us from working class backgrounds were brought up with it. You might not have the money to eat the food the upper classes did, but you could do it the way they did it.
Except that some of it was not the way they did it. The classic example was fish knives. Fish knives were invented by cutlery manufacturers to sell to the aspiring lower classes as a thing your 'betters' have. How many other things might we have done that we believed people we never met did because we read it in an etiquette book?
Ultimately, let's face it, these rules were created by people who had the time and money to play with their food. Subconsciously, we still see these rules as indicative of wealth and success because originally, they were. How much money you had determined what sort of food you had, how much you had of it, where you ate it and who with.
These days, I doubt whether even the most encrusted upper crust people dress for dinner every night. People from all walks of life eat in restaurants. I haven't seen a fish knife in years, but in my youth you still got them in restaurants.
I still keep the manners I grew up with when out. Many are practical and make the dining experience more pleasant for all, but it is worth remembering that some aren't, and never really were.

She posted IN SMALL CHUNKS! 🙄

Rice and curry- depending on the company and cuisine requires chopsticks

I absolutely cannot eat with chopsticks, it requires a level of co-ordination that I will never have! I am that person who asks for a knife and fork in a Chinese restaurant.

@Utterbunkum really appreciate this balanced view. I feel like this thread has given rise to a lot of judgment from those “raised properly” (please take note of the quotation marks) and some inverted snobbery from those who weren’t raised with these rules/traditions/whatever you want to call them and want to paint everyone who follows them as a haughty exclusionist snob.

I’m also noting that a lot of these problems could be solved if people in general spoke more. For example, I can’t use chopsticks, so I’d ask my host if invited over for an Asian cuisine meal if I could use a fork, probably with a hearty dose of self-deprecation and making it clear that I didn’t want to cause offence inadvertently.

Overall, it’s similar to dress codes and suchlike, but not spoken about as much. I’ve been taught (might be wrong) that dress codes are partly about showing respect for your host/workplace by putting in the effort.

Actually it does affect me. The sane way anyone acting outside social expectations does. It’s annoying, I find it rude and ill mannered. Someone grabbing the last piece of food without offering the table- selfish. Eating before the cook has sat down - ungrateful. Not putting your knife and fork together- how will I know you’ve finished. Manners and . Social convention arises for a reason. If you don’t follow the rules why don’t you? They’re simple. Or do you think you’re somehow superior to people that do which means you don’t have to.

That isn’t them affecting you. You’re having a negative reaction/opinion which you’ve decided is their fault (it isn’t, you can control your emotions). Those actions are benign, I seriously doubt anyone is thinking “I know, I’ll show some disrespect to the cook and the other guests”. How far do you take “being affected by people acting outside social convention”? Do you think people with an unusual dress sense or a face tattoo or a unusual job like a circus performer are also sinning against etiquette? Nobody ever died because someone ate the last olive. People need to lighten up about this stuff. Most social conventions are arbitrary made-up stuff that have no tangible benefit to society.

So if I held my cutlery incorrectly that would affect you? If my bread chunks are too large or too buttery? If I scooped my soup the wrong way? What if I licked my knife?

Offering things to others applies to general kindness, not specific to the table. Eating before the cook has sat is entirely situational & could not be a blanket rule. Putting your cutlery together when eating dinner with the family? Unnecessary.

That you can't see this is all tiresome physical pedantry based in class & pretension to the point it upsets you then that's on you, not me. If you want to waste your time, energy & wellbeing on judging others then you do you. Me? I'll carrying on being polite & kind & will enjoy my food how I see fit.

My only exceptions are noisy eaters as I have misophonia - but that's involuntary & also my problem, not anyone else's.

Lots of assumptions on this thread from posters that people not knowing their rules about table manners are ignorant neanderthals. Much of it is commonsense and being polite which many people will do anyway. "How will I know if they have finished if they don't put their knife and fork together?" - you could just ask them. Some people are saying they do look down on/judge others who don't follow these rules (yes OP it is good old-fashioned snobbery), so it is obviously being used as a social marker as well.

As the American Lizzie Post of the Emily Post Institute (a century-old authority on etiquette) says “Anyone who’s completely offended to dine with you because of how you’re holding your silverware doesn’t deserve your company.”

Part of the chopsticks issue is that we try to eat with them in an 'English' way. Moving the food from plate to mouth with implements, not moving the plate up closer to our mouths. The best advice I got was from a taxi driver on my way to a particular Chinese restaurant that served food with chopsticks. He said they also serve the food in bowls, not plates, because that's how it would be served in China. When you eat with chopsticks, you pick the bowl up. You don't attempt to move the food from table level to mouth. I felt self-conscious lifting the bowl up in the restaurant, so didn't. The taxi driver wasn't Chinese, so he could have been spinning me a line, but have privately tried it and it works!
I have since looked it up, and moving the bowl closer to your mouth when eating is correct, but isn't correct for every chopstick using country. In Korea, apparently, it's bad manners to move the dish off the table.

That being said, I have never actually been to China and what I read might not be accurate, so I still wouldn't do it in a restaurant unless I saw Chinese people doing it.

What a ridiculous comment. Are you like this with all rules? Is it ok if you I walk up to someone in the street and say fuck you you fucking cunt? After all no one died and it’s just them taking offence.

Do you show a similar attitude to all rules?

Actually someone licking their knife is both disgusting and dangerous, you shouldn’t be lol king anything at the table.

do you not think people should say please and thank you? Why do you think offering something to others is kind?

You do realise the purpose of shared agreed behaviours in all settings don’t you? You realise it’s a fundamental human bonding thing.

My grandparents would be getting dizzy in their graves now.
I eat most of my meals out of a bowl with a spoon, spaghetti is always cut up, otherwise I use fusilli. Using a fork takes too long because stabbing pasta only picks up 3 bits and if you scoop the fecking things fall off.
I dont eat out because that involves peopling so my manners are my own.

Why is it more disgusting than licking any other piece of cutlery?

How many times has anyone cut their tongue licking a table knife?

Finally - I was a waitress & bar person for years & can categorically say that those who most adhere to these rules are the LEAST likely to say please and thank you because they are MOST likely to look down on the person serving them.

Make of that what you will ;)

Only the ones I think are antiquated and pointless.

The people I hang out with would think I’d gone mental if I started fussing about how to spoon soup so it certainly wouldn’t be a bonding experience

We were raised with strict table manners too. In turn, my sons were strictly raised. You are NOT being unreasonable.

I will add one more item to your list: not only do you break off pieces of a roll, you also individually butter those pieces. You do not butter the entire roll at once. 😃