Table Manners!

Our book today is a slim little garlic tart: Table Manners: How to Behave in the Modern World and Why Bother, a 130-page guide to proper behavior written by Jeremiah Tower, whose author-note refers to him, non-ironically and without so much as a glance in the direction of the Maidu or Mojave, as “the forefather of Californian cuisine.” Tower has opened a number of chi-chi restaurants in San Francisco and elsewhere, and since the stereotypical characterization of habitual restauranteurs as brutish, mobbed-up arrivistes is only one thin translucent onion-slice away from being photographically accurate, a reader could be forgiven for raising an eyebrow at the thought of a manners guide being offered by anybody who’s ever made himself hoarse and red-faced screaming at busboys he pays $1.50 an hour.

Luckily, when you look closer at the thing, you realize it’s saved by its modest scope. “Table manners” is exactly right: this is Tower’s little book about what he knows best: behavior, appalling and otherwise, specifically centered on the preparation, consumption, and sharing of food. There’s no section on how to treat your employees with even a modicum of basic civility if you happen to own the chi-chi restaurant where they work, but everything else is covered.

The book is playfully illustrated by an artist with the charmingly Edith Whartonesque name of Libby Vanderploeg, and there are short, punchy, almost pugnacious (there’s that stereotype again) chapters on how to host a dinner party, how to attend a dinner party, how to navigate a group meal at a restaurant, and even a chapter called “Techiquette” on what to do when Instagram, Facebook, and live-tweeting make unwanted appearances at your carefully-planned social gathering. But wherever two or more of you are gathered in the name of gastronomy, there Tower is also, with ready quips about, for instance, bringing your own food on a plane:

Just because US airlines have turned to barbarism doesn’t mean you have to. Once you’re in your seat, it’s too late to wonder why you brought smelly, messy, spillable food with you. Raw garlic may be ambrosia to you, but smelly clouds of it spreading over the rows around you may not be to anyone else.

Or sharing food at a table full of guests:

If you dig in for a taste of someone’s food without asking first, then that person had better be in love with you.

Or his comment about the quantity of food to be served, a comment likely to leave the average Irish reader slack-jawed in scandalized objection:

If the guests leave the event stuffed and uncomfortable, they will think of you not as a successful host, but a blundering one.

(Here Tower’s somewhat elitist leanings – there’s a whole section on the proper use of finger bowls – lead him a bit afield from the experiences of most of his readers, I’m betting; among the simple folk, the clear and Heaven-ordained end goal of any friendly food-oriented gathering is for your guests to waddle homeward a good six pounds heavier than they were when they arrived at your door)(or, to put the whole thing in explicitly canine terms: “stuffed” is never “uncomfortable”)

There’s a pleasing strand running throughout the book that stands in sharp, welcome contrast to the Selfie Era: Tower is forever urging his readers to watch, to listen, to accede, to go along – to restrain, in other words, their self-absorption in order to make others feel more comfortable. He calls it the Platinum Rule:

This book should be viewed as less about rules and more about suggestions. The world changes. But the general principle of good table manners will never change. You are always correct and safe from any embarrassing gaffes if you remember the Platinum Rule: do unto others as they would have you do.

The telegraphic brevity of Table Manners is, in fact, its only real concession to modern attention spans geared to 140 characters; all the rest is the kind of thing that was being written (at greater length and, it must be said, with very much greater charm) by the great Miss Manners half a century ago. The sad truth is that even these bare minimum maxims of public courtesy are rapidly fading from collective memory, to the point where Tower’s book already looks a little anachronistic. But there’s no harm in trying.