Place Settings and Serving Etiquette
2 min readPlace Settings and Serving Etiquette
An individual place seting for an everyday meal includes a bowl of fan，a pair of chopsticks，a flat-bottomed soup spoon，and a saucer.Instead of a napkin，a hot towel is often provided at the end of the meal for the diner to wipe his hands and mouth.The meat and vegetable dishes are laid out all at once in the center of the toble，and the diners eat directly from the communal plates using their chopsticks.
Soup is also eaten from the common bowl.Rather than for serving oneself a separate portion，the saucer is used for bones and shells or as a place to rest a bite taken from a communal plate when it is too large to eat all at once.It is perfectly acceptable to reach across the table to take a morsel from a for-away dish.To facilitate access to all the dishes，Chinese dining tables are more likely to be square or round，rather than elongated like their western counterparts.
Who Eats When and How
Eaing begins in order of seniority，with each diner taking the cue to start from his or her immediate superior.Children are taught to eat equally from each ts’ai dish in turm，never betraying a preference for a particular item by eating more of it，never seeming to pause to choose a specific bite from the plate.In order to cool the soup a bit and to better diffuse the flavor in the mouth，soup is eaten by sipping from the spoon while breathing in.
This method，of course，produces the slurping noise that is taboo in the West.To eat fan，a diner raises the bowl to her lips and pushes the grains into her mouth with chopsticks.This is the easiest way to eat it and shows proper enjoymenteating fan from a bowl left sitting on the table suggests dissatisfaction with the food.The diner must finish all the fan.To leave even a grain is considered bad manners，a lack of respect for the labor required to produce it.
