WHAT MAKES A GOOD TABLE

Decided Before Anyone Sits

Most of what goes wrong at a dinner goes wrong before the soup. Somebody is placed beside the person who can help them. Somebody else chooses the wine by its label. By the second course the table has become several smaller tables that happen to share a cloth.

The Court’s answer is to settle those things in advance and to settle them firmly. At The Summer Table the places are drawn at the door, dinner is at eight, and there is one toast at the end with nobody speaking after it. At The New Year Luncheon the courses are fixed and “nothing is chosen”. At The White Tie Dinner the plan is settled a fortnight ahead and the courses are fixed. This is preparation, done so that nobody at the table has to spend attention on it.

The argument of this essay is that a good table is made by subtraction. Each decision taken away from the guests is a decision they cannot use against one another, or against themselves, and what remains is the thing a table is for.

The Question of Places

The oldest question at any table is who sits where, and for most of its history the answer was rank. In 1791 Trusler, in The Honours of the Table, wrote that “both men and women have sat above each other, according to the rank they bear in life.” Victorian couples went down to dinner “in order of precedence”. By 1922 Emily Post’s Mrs. Worldly had replaced rank with judgement: she laid out her place cards “very much as though playing solitaire”, trying “to seat side by side those congenial to each other.”

The case for Mrs. Worldly is a strong one, and it deserves to be put fairly. A hostess who knows her guests can do what no lot can: seat the shy beside the generous, keep apart two people with an old quarrel, and give a newcomer a neighbour who will look after them. Precedence, too, spared everyone the work of deciding. Neither system is foolish.

The Court’s practice is to take the decision away from the people with the most to gain from it. At The Summer Table each member draws a card, and the card gives the place: “Nobody is put above anybody, and nobody is put next to anybody on purpose.” The Black Tie Dinner draws its seating as well. At The Winter Table there is no placement at all, and the entry gives the reason plainly: “a seating plan decides in advance who is worth talking to, and the point of the evening is that nobody has decided.”

The Court is not dogmatic about method. At The Long Table Sunday Lunches the house sets out the cards the evening before, two members who arrive together are seated apart, and before the pudding every other member is moved six places along. At The White Tie Dinner there is a plan, because the Court’s formal dinner of the year keeps the forms that come with it. What these tables share is not lot as such. It is that no member chooses their own neighbour, and no member is chosen as one.

The Food That Is Not Chosen

Table d’hôte is French for the host’s table. From the end of the seventeenth century the inns and caterers of Paris laid one: a large table, a set price, a fixed meal, and whoever else had come. The restaurant replaced it by offering a choice from a card, and in time a table to each party. That was a real gain in freedom, and the opposing view should be taken seriously: a diner who chooses his own dish and his own companions is better served, in one sense, than one who takes what he is given.

The Court keeps the older arrangement for a different reason. The Long Table Sunday Lunches, which take their name from it, keep “one table, one meal, and neighbours one did not choose.” Lunch comes on platters and is passed from hand to hand, and the wine stands on the table for members to pour for their neighbours. At The Winter Table game and root vegetables are brought to the table in what they were cooked in, served from the middle rather than the side, and dishes are passed. A menu is a private transaction with the kitchen; a dish passed along the table is an obligation to one’s neighbours.

The fixed meal also lets the season speak. The Game Dinner leaves its menu unfixed until a few days beforehand, so that what comes to the table is what is in season and properly hung. It exists, in the words of Cornell’s Wild Harvest Table programme, because game provides “not only food for the table but stories and histories for those gathered around the table.” The Oyster and Champagne Evening puts out two or three beds side by side, “so that they can be tasted against one another”, and nothing else until later. In each case the guests have been relieved of choosing so that they can attend to what is in front of them.

The Label Off

The clearest form of the argument is The Vintners’ Table: twelve at one table, the bottles decanted and numbered before anyone sits down, and nobody in the room knowing the order, the Court included. Cards are collected before the labels are shown. The entry states the principle in a sentence that serves for the whole of the Court’s tables: “What a thing costs and what a thing is worth are separate questions, and the second is only answerable with the label off.”

A label on a bottle does at the glass what a seating plan does at the chair. It tells the guest what to think before they have had the chance to think it. Take it away and expertise stops being a rank; “a member who has never scored a wine in their life has as good a chance at the table as anyone.”

The comparison with La Paulée de Meursault is instructive, because the Paulée does the opposite and is no worse for it. Each guest brings bottles from his own cellar, the growers go from table to table pouring their own, and there are “Pas moins de cinq verres” at each place. There the bottle is a gift, and its provenance is the point of giving it. The difference is the size and purpose of the company. Several hundred people who share a trade can let the labels speak. Twelve people who are meant to be finding one another out are better without them.

What Is Not Done at Table

A good table is defined as much by what it forbids as by what it serves, and the Court’s lists of what is asked are short and nearly identical from one entry to the next. Telephones stay in pockets. Nobody is pitched at the table; at The Winter Table, “What follows from an evening is for those concerned to arrange elsewhere.” The Court sits down at the hour whether or not everyone is there.

Speech is rationed most strictly of all. The Summer Table keeps one toast, given by the member who drew the head of the table, and “Nobody speaks after it.” The New Year Luncheon gives one toast at the start “and it is short”. The Black Tie Dinner ends with port left on the table “rather than a speech”. A speech turns a company into an audience. One toast, kept short, marks the occasion and hands the room back.

Time is a limit of the same kind. “The point of the middle of the day is that it ends,” says The New Year Luncheon, and its tables rise when they rise, with nothing arranged for afterward. The Friday Supper Club runs the other way, laid after the theatre hour, with the table staying until the last of the company leaves. A guest who knows the shape of an evening can give it their whole attention.

The Size of a Company

The last decision taken in advance is the number of chairs, and here the Court’s entries are unusually precise. Fourteen at The Winter Table, “among the smallest tables the Court sets”. Twelve at The Vintners’ Table. Sixteen at The Friday Supper Club, and sixteen at The Harbour Lunch, “as many as the yacht will seat at lunch on deck”. Eighteen at The Concours Luncheon, “few enough for every car to be talked about”. Twenty-four at The Long Table Sunday Lunches, “as many as one table will seat and still be one company.”

That last phrase is the measure. A table is one company or it is several, and past a certain size it cannot help becoming several. The number is what the room, the boat or the lawn will hold while the table stays one conversation.

Who is let in is a harder question, and the Almanac does not pretend otherwise. New York’s tables have often been made by exclusion. Ward McAllister held that there were “only 400 people in fashionable New York Society”, and El Morocco was called “one of the most caste-conscious, costly and cloistered night clubs in the world.” A members’ table is open to the same charge, and the charge is fair as far as it goes: any table with a fixed number of chairs leaves people outside it. The Court’s reply lies in what happens once the door is shut. At The Summer Table the table is laid for the full membership and places are drawn, so that the whole of the Court sits down together “in an order nobody chose.” At The New Year Luncheon a member may bring one guest rather than two, because “half of it is meant to be people the other half has not met.” The aim is a company in which rank, money and acquaintance count for as little as the arrangements can make them.

The Garden Picnics recall where the word began: pique-nique, a meal to which every guest brought or paid a share. In 1802 the Pic Nic Society of London met on that footing, each member bringing part of the food and the entertainment, with no host. The Court does host, and brings the hampers, the linen and the staff itself. But the older idea survives in its tables all the same. Once the places are drawn, the courses fixed, the labels off and the telephones away, nobody at the table is anybody’s patron. Each guest brings only what cannot be arranged in advance.