Service à la russe facts for kids

Service à la russe (pronounced "ser-VEES ah lah ROOS") is a fancy way of serving food. It means "service in the Russian style."

Imagine you're at a very formal dinner. With service à la russe, your food comes out one course at a time. A waiter puts the food on your plate, usually away from the table, and then brings it to you. This style became popular in the Western world during the 1800s.

It's different from an older style called service à la française ("service in the French style"). In that style, all the food for a course was put on the table at once. There would be many big dishes, and guests would serve themselves.

Service à la russe had some cool benefits:

• Your food stayed much hotter when it reached your plate.
• The table wasn't crowded with lots of dishes and bowls.
• Everyone could try every dish they wanted.

However, it also meant you didn't see the amazing display of all the food at once. It also needed more waiters and special dishes, so only very rich families could afford it. This style also made dinners shorter.

The Russian Ambassador Alexander Kurakin is often given credit for bringing service à la russe to France in 1810. It later became popular in England by the 1870s and 1880s. In France, people were slower to adopt it, and service à la française stayed common until the 1890s. Today, most modern Western restaurants use a version of service à la russe.

There was also a less formal style in France called service à l'anglaise ("English service"). Here, the hostess served the soup, and the host carved the meat. Servants would bring these to the guests, but guests would serve themselves other dishes.

How is a Table Set for Service à la Russe?

A formal table setting for service à la russe with eight courses.

For a very proper service à la russe meal, the table setting is quite specific. Each guest's spot, called a "cover," has:

• A large service plate (this stays on the table until the main course).
• All the cutlery (forks, knives, spoons) you'll need, except for dessert.
• Glasses for water, wine, and champagne.
• A rolled napkin and a place card on the service plate.
• A saltcellar, a small nut dish, and a menu above the plate.

The cutlery is arranged in a special way:

• To the right of the service plate, from the outside in, you'll find the oyster fork (often resting in the soup spoon), then the fish knife, the meat knife, and the salad knife.
• To the left, from the outside in, are the fish fork, the meat fork, and the salad fork.
• If both salad and fruit are served, extra cutlery is brought out later. It's considered bad manners to have more than three knives or forks on the table at once (the oyster fork is an exception).

What is the Order of Service?

When guests sit down, they usually remove their napkins and place them on their laps. Some traditions say guests should wait until the host does this. Similarly, the host is usually the first to start eating, and guests follow.

Here's how the plates are changed:

• First, an oyster plate is placed on the service plate.
• After the oysters, the soup plate replaces it.
• Once the soup is finished, both the soup plate and service plate are taken away. A warm, empty plate is then put in their place.
• The main rule is: a plate with food is always replaced with an empty one. There should always be a plate in front of a guest until just before the dessert course.

For fish and meat courses, the food is usually served from large platters. This is because, in proper service, a plate already filled with food is not placed in front of a guest. This allows the guest to choose how much food they want. However, this rule is not always followed in restaurants today.

Just before dessert, everything except the wine and water glasses is removed from the table. Any crumbs are cleared away. Then, the dessert plate is brought out. It often has a doily and a finger bowl on top, with a fork on the left and a spoon on the right. Guests remove the doily and finger bowl, moving them to the left of the plate. They then place the fork to the left of the plate and the spoon to the right.

How Many Courses Are Served?

The number of dishes served in a service à la russe meal has changed over time. However, the basic order has stayed similar since the mid-1800s:

• It usually starts with soup.
• Then come various main dishes (called entrées).
• Next is the roast meat or game.
• After that, vegetables (including salads) and sweets.
• Finally, coffee.

This order actually comes from the much older service à la française. Even though all the food was on the table at once in that style, people usually ate the dishes in a similar order.

In the late 1800s, dinners could be very elaborate. Some chefs and etiquette experts, like Sarah Tyson Rorer, felt these dinners were too much for most people. She suggested a simpler meal: soup, roast, and dessert. She believed that even a simple dinner could be complete and satisfying.

Over time, formal dinners became shorter. By the early 1900s, a very formal dinner usually had no more than eight courses:

• Hors-d’œuvre (small appetizers)
• Soup
• Fish
• Entrée (a main dish, often meat in a sauce)
• Roast
• Salad
• Dessert
• Coffee

After World War II, dinners became even shorter. Today, a formal dinner often has about five courses:

• Soup, oysters, or melon
• Fish or an entrée
• Roast
• Salad
• Dessert
• After-dinner coffee

Sometimes, small dishes of radishes, celery, olives, or almonds might be placed on the table as extra "hors-d'œuvre." The number of wines served has also been reduced. Sometimes, only champagne is served after a sherry with the soup.

In some French-style dinners, a cheese course might be served after the roast, making it a six-course meal. In American-style dinners, the salad might be served as a first course instead of soup.

These four- and five-course formal dinners were common throughout the second half of the 1900s.

See also

In Spanish: Servicio a la rusa para niños