Even if you don’t have to regularly entertain the President, it is okay to sometimes conduct a semiformal dinner with your family. Here, you may want the table place setting to be just perfect. And even if there are a lot of ways to set a formal dinner table place, you can follow these tips which are easy to remember and apply!
1. The flatware arrangements
Instead of sitting the fork and knife together at the right side of the plate, you’d better put the forks at the left side of your dinner plate while placing the spoons and the knives at the right side. Here, the knife blades have to always face the plate. To make it easy for you to imagine, consider the knives are protecting the spoons from the malicious forks on the left.
2. Where to put the glass
It’s a common mistake to line the glasses up across the top of the table place setting. The right thing to do is placing them directly beneath the dinner knives. To make it details, the white wine glass needs to sit directly to the right of water glass. If you also serve red wine, make sure it sits above and closer to the center of table between the white-wine and water glasses like a triangle.
3. Napkins in a snap
For formal dinner, cloth napkins are placed on the center of the dinner plate, under the forks, or else directly to the left side of the forks. (The choice is all yours). Make sure you stick the napkin down the shirtfront, leave it on the floor, bib-style, or forget about it. Here, you can either fold the napkins into rectangles or try some fancy folds experiments to give some personality.
4. Give finishing touch
For the finishing touch of the table place setting, you may try some of these ideas:
1. Put the candles or flowers as the centerpieces of the table.
2. Fill water glasses at the table right before the guests arrive. Make sure you also fill the pitcher near the refills.
3. Make sure you set the assigning seats to avoid the awkwardness of who seat near who, or where I have to seat.
4. Keep the pepper and salt on the table for the guests. If you want to serve coffee too, leave the cups and saucers off the table and just bring them along with the dessert.
