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To answer your question, we headed straight to the Yahoo! Food and Drink Etiquette category. Food web sites Epicurious and CuisineNet, along with Ball State University and soyouwanna.com, all confirmed what our very proper mothers taught us: when at a formal dinner, start with the silverware farthest from your plate and work your way in. For example, if the place setting in front of
you has two forks to the left of your plate and two knives to the right, you use the outermost fork and knife to eat the appetizer or salad. Then you use the innermost fork and knife for the main course. At a formal dinner, forks will always be placed to the left of the plate and knives will be on the right. Two exceptions are soup spoons and oyster or shellfish forks. The soup spoon will be on the right, to the outside of the knives, and an oyster or shellfish fork will be to the right of the soup spoon (or to the right of the knives, if no soup spoon is needed). Traditionally, an oyster or shellfish appetizer is served first, then soup, followed by salad, and then the main course, so all the silverware is arranged in this order. If dessert will be served, a dessert fork and/or
dessert spoon may be placed near the top of your plate, parallel to the table edge. Sometimes dessert utensils are only brought to the table with the dessert itself. Follow this simple rule and you can't go wrong, unless the table is not properly set, of course!
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