
Dining Etiquette Around the World: A Traveler's Primer
Chopstick taboos, tipping norms, and the small gestures that tell a room you belong at the table.
Restaurants, bakeries, wine rooms and market counters covered with the dish to order.

Chopstick taboos, tipping norms, and the small gestures that tell a room you belong at the table.

The same gesture reads as generosity in one country and an insult in another. Here is how to tell which table you are sitting at.

A tasting menu in Tokyo, a trattoria in Rome, and a steakhouse in New Orleans each carry a different unspoken rulebook, and the wrong outfit rarely ruins the meal but can change the room.

Three European Union marks appear on menus, rinds and market stalls, and they answer three different questions — where a food was made, how much of it was made there, and whether only the method is protected.

Rice, soup, main, side, pickles — the teishoku set is ichiju-sansai made portable, the cheapest way to eat Japan's most balanced meal, and its logic explains the whole table.

Entrée, plat, a glass of wine and coffee inside an hour — France's midday formule is the country's real daily cuisine, and it welcomes any traveler who arrives before one.