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My Dinner With Amber

Emily Post once said, “Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use.” While we agree with Ms. Manners, we found that a flattering fork can make your table setting a cut above.

Despite its underwhelming moniker, flatware can be edgy and elegant, not to mention an all-around great topic of conversation for a dinner party.
flatware experts stathis peter patterson daniel wagner heather

In the Seinfeld episode “The Pledge Drive,” George Costanza takes to eating his handheld desserts with a knife and fork after learning that Elaine’s boss slices into his Snickers bar as one would a steak or a pork chop. While this act devolves into typical Seinfeldian farce (before long, everyone on the Upper West Side is eating everything from doughnuts to cookies in the Continental style), the proliferation of Western dining etiquette and its requisite accoutrements happened in much the same way.

As Margaret Visser explains in her book The Rituals of Dinner, “The use of individual forks began to spread as the seventeenth century progressed. People would often share forks with others as they would spoons, wiping them carefully on their napkins before passing them on.” Before the fork, people ate primarily with their hands. This was not only acceptable, it was preferable, as it still is in many places (and, it should be noted, with greater efficacy). For Westerners, however, there are few instances when forgoing the spoon, knife, and fork is forgiven; as even a sitcom episode can attest, the manner by which we wield our utensils is open for interpretation, but it’s table manners that separate the genteel from the gauche.

As etiquette is an invention of the social animal, and eating is ideally a social endeavor, Dwell arranged a dinner for four (three experts, one editor) to test out six sets of exemplary cutlery—sort of like a potluck of people. While there’s a lot that can go wrong at a dinner party, at the very least we had the number of guests right. As Visser relates, “Varro said that diners should number no fewer than the Graces (three) and no more than the Muses (nine).” It turns out that our three experts, Daniel Patterson, Peter Stathis, and Heather Wagner, are all graceful and inspiring to a fault, and have a lot to say about the state of their flatware.

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