Fancy dinners?

Some families still practice and teach their children table manners.

Other families do not sit down as a family to eat due to everyone being on a different schedule, so perhaps the opportunity to teach table manners is lost.

I learned table manners and it is just second nature at this point. I also taught my children how to dine at a table. Since they were very small, I taught them how to behave at a table and to this day, they are now adults, and they are fantastic dinner guests.

We ate out often when the children were young and we forever got compliments from the wait staff and fellow diners in regard to our childrens' behavior while dining. The mothers of my children's peers loved having my children over for dinner as I also taught my kids to bring their plates and utensils up to the sink after asking to be excused from the table.

I love dishware and tablecloths. So, my children learned fine dining etiquette, I am proud to say. I do not know many adolescent or teenage boys who can eat a dinner with tomato sauce and not get one spec on the tablecloth!! LOL

I have no idea what other people know about table manners.

I'm really curious to read your instructions on how to 'enter a chair'.

And what can you possibly mean by 'the wrong water'?

As to your plate being taken away before you had finished, you should have told the server.

As for everyone else's 'table ettiquette', I'm afraid you cannot change it.

You should have first gotten attention by clinking you glass with an entre knife ( NOT the butter knife- that’s just crass) then suggested to the assorted peasantry a quick 5 point tip on the way to act in public. Thirdly gone to the waiters station and given them a thoroughly good seeing to with hot crumpets on their bottoms and remonstrate about the social conventions of removeing your eating vessel at the appropriate time and what temperature to serve the Chablis. Hey presto problem solved.

Yes, there's all kinds of very specific ways to do all of that. The point of it being that you show you know how, that you were taught it and thus have "good breeding" and are a member of the aristocracy or court. That said, outside of the aristocracy, different people think different things are proper etiquette and others are not.

There's no standard anymore, decorum has not been upheld. So where drinking with pinkies up and pulling out a chair for a lady are good, only buttering the bite of bread you will eat and bringing your food you to you, not you to your food is bad. But using the back of the bowl to eat your soup is good. And it'll all be reversed in the next place.

As to your first point, when the head of the table is done, everyone is done, whether they are done or not.

Rules change. If you took that same class today, you might be surprised.

And here's the thing about dinner etiquette: ultimately it's decided by who gives the dinner. Which means if your hosts didn't have a problem with anything that was going on, then that's all there is to say about it.

Most people don't consider Olive Garden a fancy restaurant.

i would just go sornewhere else next tirne

We're heathens