(Reuters.com) - Eating in china is all about enjoying the food and the company. But the one thing that novices tend to focus on when starting their China eating adventure is their skill with chopsticks.

Using a spoon and your chopsticks together is perfectly acceptable; many restaurants in major cities will also have knives and forks handy should you require them.

In a Chinese meal, most dishes are shared in the centre of the table. If there is a large group, a rotating glass disk (or a Lazy Susan) is placed there.

When eating Chinese food, it is customary to take only one or two bites at a time, and continue taking small portions as the dish passes you. Chinese are customarily very considerate of those around them and will give servings to people sitting on their right or left before taking food themselves.

In eating ‘family style', each person uses his or her own chopsticks to pick food out of a common serving dish. In a more formal environment, there are dedicated chopsticks and serving spoons that accompany each dish. You should use these to serve others and yourself, and then eat with your own chopsticks. If you would like to serve another person food using your chopsticks, turn them over and use the end that you are not eating from to serve the other person.

WHICH RESTAURANT?

The old adage of ‘if you want to be sure of good food, go where the locals go' holds true in china. Whether expat or Chinese, city residents have suffered the bouts of food poisoning, bad service and being overcharged, giving them an informed view that is worth following. On a very basic level, that criteria involves going to restaurants where they can be sure they will not suffer ill health effects, followed by the finer points such as value for money, ambiance, food quality and service.

An extension of this logic is to not be the first to try out a new Western restaurant unless it is opened by a seasoned china restaurateur, as it will take some time for them to train their kitchen staff to properly clean and store ingredients. It is best to give such a restaurant four to six months to get the kinks out.

The average restaurant in China will not take a booking for less than ten people. Most mid-sized restaurants will have a general seating area and then a few small private rooms. A party of six people or more will typically book a private room where they will have dedicated wait staff, a nice atmosphere to visit and relax, and if they are lucky, their own karaoke setup. When booking a private room, it is common for the restaurant to ask for a minimum charge on food and drinks to be consumed.

CORPORATE HOSPITALITY

At any banquet, you will be expected to participate as a guest. The most usual form of this is rounds of drinking. They begin with a twinkling-eyed person leaning toward you across the table, filling your glass and shouting "gan bei", which is the Chinese equivalent of ‘bottoms up'. If toasted in this manner, you are to drink the entire contents of your glass, and once finished, tip the glass toward the person that initiated the toast showing that you have consumed all contents. If you are not a hardened drinker, you can usually get away with raising your glass in toast, taking a sip and setting the partially full glass back down on the table.

If you have the honoured position of being the host at a lunch or dinner, your main objective is to take extremely good care of everyone else. From the minute they enter the room, you should make sure they are guided to their seats and have something to drink.

You should take charge of ordering the food, or if you are unsure, have your assistant or someone whose judgment you trust order the food in advance. There should be a balance of cold dishes to start, a reasonable sequence of meat, fish, vegetables in the middle, followed by soup and noodles or rice at the end of the meal. Better dinners will end with fruits as the final dish.

If you are sitting next to the guests of honour, you should make sure that their cups are never empty and serve them food before filling your own plate.

Before you are mid-way through the meal, you should make a small speech thanking your guests for attending the dinner and offer a toast to them. Look at the most senior person or people at the table when offering the toast. If there are multiple tables in the room, go from table to table offering a toast.

Do not feel insulted if everyone seems to finish dinner and get up to leave at the same time. Chinese rarely linger over a formal meal. They like to eat punctually, in more traditional places this means between 6 and 7 pm. Once the meal is finished, they will leave.

("Culture Shock! China", published by Marshall Cavendish International, can be ordered )

(Editing by Peter Myers)

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