What is the proper way to eat salad, bread and butter at a business conference meal?
There is a proper way to eat salad and bread and butter at a conference meal. Now, when you first sit down, you're going to have your salad in front of you. A waiter generally comes and will drizzle dressing over your salad for you, either in a gravy boat, or with a spoon, and you can tell him how much you'd like. Then there's usually a basket of bread on the table. Remember to always pass things to the right as when you're at any kind of a round table, or family dining, you pass to the right. So, if there's bread on the table, and there's a basket of bread on my left and on my right, Where am I going to ask them to hand me the bread? I'm going to look to my left, so they can pass it to the right, so that I can continue to pass it around the table. I'll then take the basket of bread and put the bread on a bread plate which sits to the left of your dinner fork, and at a banquet or restaurant or fine dining, there is a bread knife as well. It's small and it has a little knife nick at the top which differentiates it from other table knives, and it lays on your plate as if it were pointing at ten o'clock and two o'clock. Bread is made to be broken with your hands. You have your bread, you break it with your hands, and you eat it a bite at a time. You don't cut it. Then butter is going to passed two ways at a conference or a restaurant, either in little aluminium cold foils in a cool tray with ice in it, or, it'll be soft butter in a tub. Either way, if you get the aluminium foil wrappers, you unwrap it, lay it on your bread, take your butter knife, take a little bit of butter off of it, spread one bite at a time, put your bread knife back at the head of your plate at 10 and two, and then take a bite of your bread and eat it with your salad. Indeed any time you're dining, you always want to remember to go from utensils from the outside in. So, your salad fork is smaller than your dinner fork and you can see the difference in the length of the tines. The larger fork is the dinner fork and the shorter fork is your salad fork. You can pick up a utensil with one or two hands. You can pick it up, you can lean across your body and pick up your salad fork, and hold it like a pencil, like your going to write a letter if that's how you eat. Or, your salad fork can be picked up with two hands. You can pick it up with your left hand and put it in your right. Either is appropriate, and then you eat small bites of salad. However if you're going to eat a little cherry tomato, you've got to be careful, because it could go scooting across the table. So, you can use your dinner knife to test the tomato to see that its ripe, so that it doesn't explode, because it's happened to everybody as little cherry tomatoes are very exciting. You can place them on the edge of your knife while you're eating your salad. Now, when the waiter comes back to your plate when you're finished, hell invite you to keep your knife, and hell put it back on your plate. So when you've finished eating your salad, you have one of two choices: you can either leave it in your dish, if this were a clock, it would be eleven o'clock and four o'clock, or you may also put it on the side of your plate to signify to the waiter that you've finished with your food.
