In dining, mind your manners and butter knife Etiquette course teaches professionals to dine with class BY TOM CAIAZZA Staff Writer From top to bottom: Sasha Zea demonstrates the proper way to hold a fork and knife at professional dining events during a class at the Pines Manor in Edison about proper dinner etiquette. Students at the Professional Dining Savvy event at the Pines Manor on April 18 learned how to properly eat and socialize in a professional setting. A page out of the Dining Savvy program. EDISON - The tables were set with care. Carefully folded cloth napkins were settled serenely on the immaculate cream tablecloth with freshly polished silverware flanking oversized soup bowls. The only thing that wasn't perfect were the guests. On April 18, Maria Joyce, the founder and director of The Protocol School of New Jersey, taught business professionals and service industry employees how to dine with class at the Pines Manor in Edison. The program, called Professional Dining Savvy, teaches people the best way to make good impressions and stronger business relationships through dining etiquette. Students in the etiquette class were given a four-course meal while Joyce, ever the gracious host, calmly and serenely discussed the proper way to enter and exit a table, cut and eat food, and what to do with butter knives after they have been "soiled." PHOTOSBYJEFF GRANIT staff The program was created to teach people looking to make impressions, and to a further extent business relationships, how to show respect, class and polish in a social eating setting. "If you went to the White House, this is how you would dine," Joyce said. "If you dined with the Queen [of England], this is how you would dine. I teach how to maneuver through a four-course meal." Etiquette, it seems, begins with a smile and a handshake. Joyce said the best way to make a good impression is to be cordial and attentive when you enter a room, until the point when you leave it. "It tells them many things about you," Joyce said. "Proper business etiquette says that you take the lead and never wait for someone to greet you and make you feel comfortable." Armed with anecdotes ranging from Henry Kissinger's networking skills, to her own mother's years in Europe, Joyce took the students through the four courses of a meal, instructing at each course how to properly hold utensils, use good posture and balance socializing with eating. The tips range from the common to the obscure, and Joyce said they are traditions known the world over and followed in the circles where class matters. "These are traditions, customs and ways of behaving that exist everywhere in the world," Joyce said. "It is my belief that there is no other behavior that is quite as noticeable as our table manners." Dawn White, one of the students, said that she wanted to bring the skills she has learned back to her company in order to better their business. "In business dealings," White said, "it is important to know proper business etiquette." One may ask if these skills truly make a difference in how well professionals are received by other professionals. Joyce offered an anecdote to address that concern. She once knew a headhunter working to put one of her clients into a CEO position of a company. The man got past all of the interviews and was asked out to a meal with the prospective employer. When the meal was over, the man was not offered the job. The reason, she said, was that he did not cut his meat with class.