Why No Elbows on the Table?

History of a not-so-arbitrary rule, plus updated guidance

All my early jobs, beginning at Woody’s BBQ, were in restaurants. I’ve seen every variety of table manners. Diplomats who dabbed their mouths. Families whose toddlers crumbled all the crackers. Regulars who called me “toots”.

By the time I was in college, I’d worked my way up to a Michelin-starred Italian place. Fine dining was brutal, honestly. But I endured it because the tips felt like stripper money compared to my peers at the campus phone-a-thon.

Michelin-star service is exacting and punishing. You must perform elaborate wine-uncorking choreography, memorize all recipe ingredients, list all the tobacco notes in Montepulciano. You must stay out of sight, but also anticipate every need. We’ve all seen The Bear so I won’t go on.

During my time at this restaurant, I came to understand how wealth, class, and kindness shape behavior. The regulars were polished, confident, effortless. My family did not have a particularly refined relationship with food, (see my essay from season 2, How to Taste, for my hillbilly history). Never, in my middle-class life, had I eaten at a Michelin-starred establishment. Watching the customers here, I noticed all sorts of new-to-me behaviors: how to gracefully light a cigarette, how to swirl a snifter, how to cleanly carve a Cornish hen. (To be clear, I also saw plenty of tactless, pretentious, and boorish behavior—but I’m focusing here on the good.)

One thing I recognized: no elbows on the table.

This one behavior tended to separate the graceful from the rude. So, what’s with this custom? Where does it come from? What’s the point?

To understand, I had to go back. Back to the origins of how manners came to be defined as self-restraint.

Body politics

At a fundamental level, table manners signal self control.

Historically, regulating your body and emotions demonstrated refinement and discipline. The opposite—moving too freely, letting your limbs relax or sprawl—was considered inconsiderate of others’ personal space, a lack of self mastery.

Similarly, losing emotional composure was highly improper.

Take Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice for example. He confesses his love for Elizabeth Bennet by saying, “I beg you, most fervently, to relieve my suffering and consent to be my wife.” This was, for the time, an explosive and humiliating display of emotion.

In the 1922 edition of Etiquette, Emily Post writes, “In [a gentleman’s] own self-control lies his chief ascendancy over others who impulsively betray every emotion. Exhibitions of anger, fear, hatred, embarrassment, ardor, or hilarity, are all bad form.” In public, and especially at the table, the well-mannered were expected to maintain composure in speech, posture, movement, and expression at all times.

But etiquette hasn’t always been so strict.

Early manners were primarily about hygiene and order. Sociologist Norbert Elias, in The Civilizing Process, cites the mundane and grotesque instructions of early etiquette guides: In the 13th century, Tannhäuser advised not to blow one’s nose on the tablecloth (use your sleeve instead); in On Civility In Boys (1530), Erasmus instructed readers not to lick the dish or urinate in view of others.

Plus, medieval dinner tables weren’t tables at all. They were planks of wood resting on trestles. If you put your elbows or body weight on this surface, you risked upturning the whole banquet.

Dining tables in the Middle Ages were constructed from planks and trestles, food was eaten with the hands and a personal knife (l) Luttrell Psalter, mid-14th century; (r) Fiore di virtù e de costumi, 15th century

Also consider, everyone at dinner was armed. In the Middle Ages, before modern cutlery, people ate with their hands and their personal knife—a very sharp, multi-purpose blade or dagger. Keeping tempers in check was critical. This led to the common law “don’t talk politics or money,” a self-control guideline that preserved social harmony, lest you have a Red Wedding situation.

Art of control

By the 17th and 18th centuries, manners evolved into a much stricter form of bodily discipline, reinforcing hierarchical control. King Louis XIV’s court at Versailles turned dining into a form of performance, where every movement—from the depth of a bow to the way you held a fork—was dictated by strict rules.

This power dynamic was an important tool of control for the aristocracy. Elaborate table manners served as in-group signals for high-class spaces, ensuring that anyone unfamiliar would betray their lower status with a graceless error.

Historian Margaret Visser describes this in The Rituals of Dinner: “Take olives with a spoon but never a fork, take walnuts with fingers, serve cheese with a knife, always take milk products with a spoon even if they are firm enough for a fork, use a spoon to eat curry, and know which way to sweep your spoon when eating soup.”

(l) portrait of Louis XIV by Hyacinthe Rigaud, (r )Banquet for Queen Victoria hosted by Napoleon III in the Royal Opera of Versailles, 1855, by Eugene Lami

And all of this must be performed effortlessly. Visser writes, “No sign must appear of all the training involved in the production of ‘polish.’ No effort, no hesitation, no clumsiness of movement must intrude.”

Strangely, these elaborate table manners made eating—the primary purpose of the table!—deliberately more challenging. But the performance was the point. The theatre of etiquette made dinner into a ceremony, a celebration. These theatrics elevated the affair above a basic feed. Needing food to survive was humiliating. Such a peasant concern! How embarrassing to acknowledge bodily function!

To seem overly absorbed in food risked appearing hungry or gluttonous. Behaviors that signaled enjoyment—slurping, burping, smacking lips, sighing, or patting one’s belly—indicated vulgar, insufficient control over the appetite.

Post sums up the sentiment like this: “All rules of table manners are made to avoid ugliness; to let any one see what you have in your mouth is repulsive; to make a noise is to suggest an animal; to make a mess is disgusting.”

Also, corsets. Stooping forward was impossible in a corset (which were worn by both men and women). Bending to lean on your hand was uncomfortable and unnatural looking. Thus, bodily discipline was reinforced down to the very foundation of undergarments.

“Stillness of feature corresponded to the immobility required by correct posture. At table, one was to sit bolt upright,” Visser writes. “There was to be no leaning, either to left or to right, and no elbows on the table, for these encroached on the space of others and suggested a lack of total bodily control.”

What began as practical measures to promote hygiene and social harmony, transformed over time into a display of self-discipline and exclusivity.

So, because of all this, the no-elbows rule persists. A person who sprawls, fidgets, or takes up too much space is still seen as undisciplined or even disrespectful. Sitting up straight, elbows in, behaving with emotional composure are markers of control—and by extension, of refinement and status.

And now?

Do we still need this rule, though? Maybe we should scrap it, considering it was created to reinforce classist hierarchy? Plus, we’re no longer under the scrutiny of a monarch or aristocratic elite. Most American dining is pretty casual by comparison. Unless you’re having a Jack in Titanic moment, or supping with the President, you don’t need to know which is the oyster fork and which is the dessert spoon.

(top) formal place settings according to The Emily Post Institute (source), (bottom) St. George’s Hall at Windsor Castle (source)

So, yes, for most occasions, elbows on the table are allowed. It is better to just be casual in a casual atmosphere. Sitting awkwardly erect in the booth at Chile’s is just uncomfortable. If you're drinking a margarita out of a bowl, you can drop the formalities.

Here’s my take: Before the food arrives and after it’s cleared, elbows are fine. Lean forward, show interest in the conversation, rest your chin pensively in your palm! But when the table is covered in food, elbows crowd the space and risk knocking things over.

Post offers this advice: no elbows while you’re actively eating. Avoid this unattractive scene: “Elbows planted like clothes-line poles and hands waving glasses or forks about in between.” She says eating while propped up on your elbow is reserved for the “ill or convalescent”.

So basically, adapt the rule to your circumstance and lifestyle.

But keep the no-elbows rule for formal occasions! It adds a subtle dash of pomp. Keeping your posture tall and your elbows tucked in is a ritual worthy of black tie weddings, awards ceremonies, affairs of state, or the Met Gala (I can dream). It demonstrates regard for personal space and respect for the gravity and spectacle of the celebration.

During my time in fine dining I served Congressmen, French diplomats, and even Oprah (she tipped $1K, not kidding). I felt like an anthropologist, observing the elaborate rituals of the rich and powerful. While much of it was pantomime and bluster, the truly graceful were marked by simple traits: kindness, respect, and self-control.

The no-elbows rule has survived since the Middle Ages, and it’s durable for a reason. It holds symbolic relevance. In my daily life, where I’m otherwise slouching over my computer or scrolling my phone, sitting up straight, focusing on my companions, and giving the dinner my full attention feels different and special. I think affording the ceremony of a meal this respect and attention is, more than any arbitrary rule, the marker of good manners.

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Sources

Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home, Emily Post, 1922

The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, Norbert Elias, 1939

The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners, Margaret Visser, 1991

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You’re reading Season 3 of The Ick. The social rulebook has been rewritten in our post-pandemic world—and it's left us wondering, “Am I doing this right?” Season 3 of The Ick is creating a modern field guide to social etiquette and decoding the hidden architecture of human connection. Subscribe here. Find season 1: embarrassing stories here, and season 2: the five senses here.