Dine Like You're Dining with Royalty
You never know who'll be sitting at your table later in life
One of the most repeated, least-appreciated stories my parents told my brothers and me when we were kids was “Dine like you’re dining with the Queen”.
It was right up there with “Did I ever tell you what it was like when I was a little boy?”. That was Dad’s go to response when my little brother complained about life’s hardships.
The man who brought the dine-line into our lives was a Norwegian engineer. He worked on the development of the Jasper SkyTram.
Because the man was Norwegian, my father invited him to dinner. Perhaps our small-town ways and lack of formal etiquette inspired the stranger to tell the story that our parents found necessary to repeat so many times over the years.
It would be decades before I understood the meaning of his words. They certainly meant nothing to three little hillbilly boys growing up in the Rocky Mountains at a time when railroad workers and park rangers were in far greater numbers than tourists.
The man said he raised his children to be polite, educated, and well-informed citizens. Table manners were enforced by telling them to “dine like they were dining with the King!” (Norway had a male monarch; my parents changed the line in the hope it would be more relevant to us in Canada.)
His reasoning was that they would be prepared and capable if they ever found themselves in the presence of royals.
My brothers and I joked about what it looked like in his kids’ school cafeteria. We envisioned these dainty educated kids, sitting quietly and politely drinking their tea with a pinky finger pointing out, while food fights and other “normal” chaos erupted all around them. Small-town humour from small-town boys.
Attention to detail was never a big part of my life growing up. My mother still loves to tell the story of a Saturday Spring Cleaning day. To her amazement, I remained in my room alone for hours before I finally emerged and proudly declared that the task was accomplished. When inspected my room, she couldn’t see one single thing that had changed during my three or four hours of work. I hadn’t even made my bed.
Things didn’t dramatically change until I started working in a hotel. It was an extremely well-run, five-star property, and attention to detail was everyone’s business and everyone was good at it. It was driven by Mr. P’s Pick-Up Club. Mr. P. was an accountant, and his attention to detail was useful, but first and foremost he was a very vocal perfectionist. It meant that wherever you were in the hotel if you saw something that should be fixed, you fixed it. If there was a scrap of paper on the floor, you picked it up. If a chair in the lobby had been moved, you moved it back to where it belonged. If there were crumbs on a canteen table, you wiped the table clean. If you didn’t and Mr. P. saw you, he loudly let everyone know.
Colleagues complained about Mr. P’s club. They disliked being asked to do something that “wasn’t their job”, but they joined in because getting yelled at was even less fun and Mr. P. seemed to be everywhere all the time.
I’m willing to bet that the experience of perfection was one of the reasons we were the flagship hotel in the city and the company.
When the hotel hosted large conferences and banquets, staff from every department were sent in to set up the ballroom. Some would be tasked with looking down long rows of chairs to ensure that they lined up perfectly. Others would walk down the length of the dining table to ensure that knives and forks were exactly one thumbnail from the edge of the table. When the guests walked in, everything was perfectly placed.
20 years after hearing his story, I finally understood what the Norwegian engineer meant. It wasn’t about dining with royalty.
It was about understanding the value of paying attention to detail.
After moving to Copenhagen, marrying the love of my life and becoming stepdad to a ten-year-old as a bonus, I used the same sentence to try to teach our daughter table manners and etiquette. She responded just like I had when I was ten. It was all eye-rolls and bored sighs that signalled what she was thinking: “Here we go again”…
A duty manager in one of our Copenhagen hotels would have ascended a European throne if her husband’s father had been a firstborn rather than a second-born child. Instead, she was on the periphery of a European royal family and worked in a hotel. She was though, officially still a Princess.
One evening she invited us to dine with her at the hotel. Our daughter was excited and nervous, but probably not as nervous as I was. How much of that “Dine like you’re dining with the Queen” had sunk in?
As we sat down in the hotel’s informal restaurant, our daughter immediately asked:
“What’s it like to be a real Princess?”
After the laughter and our embarrassed surprise subsided, we all agreed that princesses are people too. They’re just better at dining like they’re dining with the queen because sometimes they get to practice in real life.
When we wrote our book, Spin the Bottle Service - Hospitality in the Age of A.I. we named it after the way a server poured beer.
Every time he served us a beer, he served it like he was pouring a pint for a prince.
When paying attention to the little things is just your normal way of working, it’s amazing how many big things take care of themselves!
Stay safe, Always Care
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