By Chris Cosci

There are many rules of etiquette to follow when dining out. Keep your elbows off the table. Don't talk with your mouth full. Use your napkin, not your shirt sleeve. Don't use the glasses, silverware, and salt and pepper shakers to build sculptures on the table. Well, that last one is not so much a rule as it is a desperate request from a mother to her children. (Not that I'm speaking from personal experience or anything.)

Most rules of etiquette cover proper table manners and appropriate behavior. However, there are other situations that could use a few rules. For example, a waiter starts bringing the meals out to a group of people. One by one, the customers start to place their napkins on their lap and prepare to feast on the delicious meals laid out in front of them. Then, as everybody is ready to eat, the waiter approaches the last person at the table and says, "your meal is almost ready -- it will be out in just a couple of minutes."

Suddenly, the situation becomes awkward. For a brief moment, the anticipation was over; the food had arrived, and eating could begin. Now, everybody is just staring at each other, wondering what to do next. The people with meals feel weird because they don't want to start chowing down on some food while one person just sits around with nothing to eat. The person without a meal feels weird because it seems like a cruel form of torture to place a plateful of food in front of people and then deny them the pleasure of eating it. At this point, the situation turns into a performance of a very popular, unwritten script that is somehow known and memorized by restaurant patrons around the world.

It starts with the dinnerless party saying, "Oh, you don't have to wait for me -- your food will get cold." This is followed by everybody else responding, "Please, we can wait -- it's no big deal." Meanwhile, as this futile back and forth discussion continues, unspoken emotions bubble beneath the surface. The dinnerless party tries to contemplate what exactly was so complicated about the order that it required a longer preparation time. The remaining people carefully consider whether adding salt and pepper constitutes a sufficient breach of decorum to cause a social disruption.

Many people tend to wait patiently for the remaining meal to arrive. If the meal takes an exceptionally long time to come out, some people will start to nibble on their side dishes -- as if the rice or French fries aren't technically part of the meal. As long as the primary item is untouched, one cannot be accused of starting to eat before everyone's meal has arrived.

Given the relative frequency of this occurrence, one would think that some restaurants would devise alternate techniques to cut back the number of temporarily dinnerless patrons. The obvious solution would be for waiters to leave the meals in the kitchen until all of them have been completed. However, because the world's wait staff hasn't figured this out yet, we should focus on setting up some guidelines for dealing with delayed dinner delivery.

After the orders are placed, the group needs to agree upon a set time to wait for the last meal to arrive before being allowed to start eating. Of course, this could also lead to new arguments as people try to bargain for less time due to hunger. "Come on, I haven't eaten anything since last Thursday -- I shouldn't have to wait more than thirty seconds." Then you might have to incorporate side rules for returned meals. For example, if a customer has to return a meal because the chef forgot to leave out the tomatoes that would cause the customer to break out in hives, the rest of the group should respectfully wait a few minutes. However, if the customer returns a meal because the parsley doesn't look green enough, then the rest of the group can start eating with no qualms -- perhaps even making easily audible comments about how delicious everything is.

There may not be an easy solution, but this is a situation that deserves to receive a little attention. It doesn't appear to be going away, and it can happen to anyone at any time. If it happens to you, try to come up with a unique way of dealing with the situation. I recommend using glasses and silverware to build structures on the table while waiting for the food to arrive.