Hello! For your Ambassador work, can you tell us about dining etiquette in your country? Thank you! (If you would like a different question, let me know)!
Sure thing! Thank you for the question! And sorry that it took me more than a month to answer it ^^;
Copious mentions of alcoholbelow!
Dining etiquette
Weeeeell, to tell you the truth, dining etiquette in Russiais mostly bog-standard stuff like:
knife in right, fork inleft (inapplicable for some dishes)
elbows off the table
start eating when invitedor when everyone else is ready to eat too
no open-mouthed chewing
no talking with your mouthfull
Etcetera, etcetera. Like Isaid, nothing special. Now, drinking etiquette is where it gets interesting! So I’m going to talk about it instead :Ъ
Dining Drinking etiquette
First of all, there are 2 maincomponents to social drinking in Russia:
proposing toasts
and clinking glassestogether
Toasts are proposed inorder of relevancy to the cause of celebration – both in terms of toast’scontent and the person saying it (so, for example, during a birthday party thefirst toast should be in b-day boy/girl’s honor and delivered by the closestrelative). If there’s no special occasion for the drinking, the toasts aregoing to be either generic (e.g. “to the lovely ladies” or “to meeting each other”) orbizarre. You absolutely gotta have toasts tho! Otherwise you’re tacitlyadmitting that you’re drinking just to get drunk, lol.
There’s no all-purpose toast like “Cheers” in Russian, btw. The closest is Ваше здоровье / За здоровье - “Your health / To health”, which is pretty ironic when imbibing. My favourite is the vaguest toast of them all: Ну, будем, which means “Well, let us be”. Just be. That’s all.
1 toast per person is thenorm, but depending on the number of people and some other variables one mayhave to propose several toasts or none at all. Nyway, it’s best to always havea toast in mind, just in case.
When the toast is donewith, the clinking glasses together part starts. While someone is proposing atoast, everyone else should listen attentively and either stand or sit with their glass at the ready. “Ready” here means “in yourhand and with at least some liquid in it”. It doesn’t have to be alcohol, butclinking with an empty glass is bad luck, so be prepared! Because the secondthe toast is done being told, it’s time to motherflippin clink.
Just hold your glass tightenough not to drop it but loosely enough to produce that lovely sound and gofor your nearest neighbours’ glasses! In a formal situation that’swhere it stops, but if the atmosphere is friendly, your task is to clink yourglass with everyone. Even if youneed to lean over the table or stand up to accomplish it, no glass shouldremain un-clinked!!
The less formal the partyis the more unconventional clinkage is acceptable. Don’t have a proper glass?Clink with your coffee mug or plastic cup. Don’t have even that? Clink with thebottle. Don’t have anything to drink at all but still want to be included?Invite people to bump their drinks against your fist or forehead. It’s allabout having fun and feeling united! When we were taking the Unified State Exam, myclassmate and I toasted to the power of learning and clinked together ourallotted water bottles after every block.
The only 2 times when youshouldn’t clink are: 1) If the party is too posh for it, and 2) Ifthe toast was in memory of the deceased, because then the mood needs to besolemn.
One last drinking-relatedtradition: an empty bottle should never be put on the table. You should put thecork back in /the cap back on and place it underthe table. There are 3 versions of why this tradition developed. Thesuperstitious version: it’s a bad omen, might cause poverty. The historicalversion: in the XIX century the bill in taverns was drawn according to thenumber of empty bottles on the table, so… you can guess where this is going:P Finally, the common sense version: an empty bottle takes up precious table spaceand might fall down and shatter xD
That’sit, hope everyone is now ready to dine and drink like a Russian~!
