Your guide to a perfect table setting

How to set a formal table
A formal dinner starts with soup, followed by salad, a main course and then dessert. The dinner plate can sit on a charger, which stays on the table until the dessert course is served. Other plates, such as the salad plate, soup bowl and dinner plate, are placed on it. Forks are on the left in order of use. If salad is being served after the main course, then the salad fork will sit closer to the dinner plate. If more than one knife is required, it is placed outside the dinner knife. The bread and butter plate is to the left of the forks; at a formal dinner, a butter knife lies across the top of the plate with the tip facing left and the blade down. Bread and rolls should be broken with the fingers and then buttered in bite-size pieces with the butter knife. It does not go back on the butter dish, which should have its own knife. Soup is a popular first course for formal dining – the soup spoon sits outside the dinner knife, and the soup bowl should sit on another plate when it is brought in so that the spoon may be placed on it for removal. Cutlery is cleared away after each course.

At a formal dinner, the utensils for dessert sit across the top of the place setting, parallel to each other with a dessert spoon on top facing left and the dessert fork below facing right. Teacups and/or coffee cups and saucers are never on a formally set table – they are brought in with dessert along with the teaspoon.

Multiple wineglasses form a triangle to the right of the place setting above the knife, with the water goblet at the tip, the next glass used to the right (often white wine if fish or seafood is served first) and the third glass (for red) just beside it to be moved forward as required. To go from main course to dessert, everything except the water goblet and dessert cutlery is removed and the plated dessert and coffee service is brought in.

The formal table
Hover your mouse over the place settings to see what goes where.

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Martha McKee is vice-president of media,communications and visual presentation with Waterford Wedgwood Canada Inc.