Serves him right – or wrong? Getting to grips with chopstick etiquette

I met up with friends at a Vietnamese restaurant. One of them used his chopsticks to serve himself from the shared plates. Am I wrong to be disgusted?
R.M., Mosman, NSW

Credit: Simon Letch

A: Forks have no rules. Do what you like with them. Use them for eating, whisking eggs, combing eyebrows, scratching buttocks. And when your partner starts their painfully tedious dinner-party rant about how nobody knows there’s a plural in John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads, you can use a fork to stab them in the thigh under the table.

Spoons have no rules. Do what you like with them. Use them for scooping soup, stirring beverages, catapulting peas, imitating a koala by hanging them from your nose. Or grab a bunch of them at a backyard barbecue and play spoon-percussion to Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road (until your partner stabs you in the thigh with a fork).

But chopsticks have rules. Lots of rules. Rules that strike fear into the heart of all diners: eating with chopsticks is like eating with loaded sniper rifles. Hold your chopsticks incorrectly and you’ve insulted the host. Point with your chopsticks and you’ve disrespected your friends. Poke your chopsticks vertically in a bowl of rice and everyone at the table will be stricken with lethargy and bankruptcy (I haven’t done the research on this, but it feels sort of right).

So you would assume that a friend using his chopsticks to transfer food from a shared plate to his own plate would cause instant death to everyone in the restaurant. But it’s culturally acceptable in Vietnam, and you’re wrong to be disgusted. However, if your friend fed himself directly from a shared plate using his chopsticks, then all future generations of his family will be cursed with bad luck, poverty, ill health and no split restaurant bills.

[e-mail]

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.