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DEAR MISS MANNERS: I am soon to host a semiformal dinner -- and no, I don’t know exactly what that means (I was kind of roped into it). I plan to have hors d’oeuvres, soup, salad, a main course, dessert and coffee.
I don’t know what order to serve the dishes in. I really don’t think the soup and salad should be served one after the other, but can’t say why. Can Miss Manners please advise?
GENTLE READER: Your instinct about this is better than your experience.
Indeed, many people now serve salad before the main course, and argue that it is better to fill up on that than on the protein and carbohydrates that follow. (And yet they eat those, anyway.) Traditionally, the salad follows the main course, but restaurants generally serve salad first, and people have come to believe that the practices of restaurants represent the best service.
They fail to realize that restaurants have to work around problems that private households do not. For instance: You know what you will serve, but restaurants can only guess which of their choices will be ordered by their clients -- who are hungry, or they wouldn’t be there. So restaurants stave them off with bread and salads until their orders are ready.
Miss Manners thanks you for calling the main course a main course, not an entree. An entree is a course served between the first and main ones. In violation of her own plea, above, to tolerate common usage, she is annoyed at the misuse of this term.
(Please send your questions to Miss Manners at her website, www.missmanners.com; to her email, dearmissmanners@gmail.com; or through postal mail to Miss Manners, Andrews McMeel Syndication, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106.)
COPYRIGHT 2023 JUDITH MARTIN
DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION
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