You're having a business lunch with your most important client. You take a bite of food and ... UGH! You're munching on a mouth full of gristle that you need to spit out. So do you reach for the napkin to secretly discard the food? Don't you dare, says etiquette expert Sonia Jacobson.
"If it goes in with the fork, it comes out with the fork," Jacobson said. And you put it right back on the plate.
That got quite a few cringes, squirms and giggles from the 30 people getting a business dinner etiquette lesson at The Bankers Club in Miami.
"It's only food - what's the big deal?" she said. "And if it goes in with the fingers, it comes out with the fingers" - like when you need to discard an olive pit.
It should be noted that these folks in attendance were no heathens - the room was filled with professionals dressed to the nines: top executives, students, retirees. But most everyone learned a few things - like Jamie Elias, partner at private equity firm Trivest Partners, who didn't realize he was eating backward all his life.
The proper international way to eat - if you are right handed - is to keep your knife in your right hand and your fork in your left.
Elias cuts left handed and kept the fork in his right. Although it looks fine to the untrained eye and it was comfortable for him, Jacobson said he actually was doing it wrong.
Americans usually juggle silverware between hands throughout a meal, such as cutting with the right and then picking up the fork with the same hand. It's not necessarily bad manners, Jacobson told the crowd, but it just won't impress a foreign client.
At the same table was Elias' sister, real estate agent Tara Elias Schuchts, who was doing pretty good using a fork in her left hand during her meal - except for handling the rice, which she only managed to rangle up a few grains at a time using her left hand.
"You could lose weight trying to get this rice up," Schuchts said while practicing.
The basic rules haven't changed much throughout the years since the first written set of table manners in the year 1290. But Jacobson, a corporate image consultant, says she is busier than ever teaching business manners, whether it's a private lesson at a law firm or lecturing high school students through her non-profit agencies Suited for Success and Dress for Success Miami.
"It's amazing how a lot of students will get out of law school and they don't know how to eat properly," Jacobson said. "It should be common sense." Etiquette consultant Colin P. D'Arcy, president of ImageMentor, said he's noticing lots of young people entering the workforce just were never taught business etiquette - perhaps because parents these days "don't have the time." He actually corrected this reporter's manners while networking with a drink: You should always hold it in your left hand, so you don't have a cold, wet hand when shaking with your right.
But it's not just a lack of manners - it's not always realizing the habits of other cultures. Take a client from Spain out for an afternoon bite to eat, and "lunch could be three hours and two bottles of wine," Jacobson said.
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