Table Manners -- Where You Sit Down To Eat Says A Lot About How You Live

CHOOSE YOUR TABLE carefully.

Tables define us. They tell the visitor, the old friend, the drop-in stranger - and the family - how we live, how we hope to live or what we merely have settled for.

Nothing is as inviting as a glowing, time-worn dinner table or an elbow-burnished kitchen table. And nothing is as forbidding as a mirror-polished, semi-antique, fragile dining-room table that looks as if it would be much happier under felt pads and two tableclothes - and if you had a more recent manicure.

Tables have character. They have personalities. Try as hard as you will, you will never fall in love with a textured-top plastic laminate table (though it may serve you silently for decades); neither will you ever feel cozy sitting down to a gleaming expanse of plate glass (much as you might admire it, coolly, from afar).

We tend to live with our tables a long time. They don't wear out easily. Even if sometimes we wish they would.

Because of the standing title of this column, Hinterberger's Table, I've often been asked what kinds of tables I like - and what kinds of tables I have. Well, I have (and have had) some doozies.

The table I have owned and lived with longest is a table I stack an occasional dressy book or magazine upon, and a brace of candlesticks.

More than 30 years ago, a friend who worked for a furniture wholesaler was clearing out showroom space to make room for the next season's line. Left over was the most handsome table I had ever seen. It was made of solid rosewood blocks; not that almost plastic-appearing, too-shiny-to-be-true rosewood veneer, but the real thing.

Inch-thick, foot-long blocks of dark, almost brooding woods, varicolored from soft burgundy to deep chocolate red-browns and hinting of the distant Brazilian jungles whence they had come. It had heavily chromed X-shaped steel legs at each end, as heavy as modernistic sculptures. If I could cart it out of the showroom, the friend said, I could have it at a little more than the dealer's cost - which was still several hundred dollars more than I could afford. My eyes popped. Such a deal.

I said I'd buy it, even if I had to survive on bread and water for a year to pay for it.

Then, a terrible realization set in; not instantly, but painfully, over time. That beautiful table wasn't being used. It was being cared for and admired, polished, dusted, buffed. But only on rare occasions did we sit down to it.

Measuring 3 by 5 feet, it should have seated six - one at each end and two on each side. But the diners seated at the ends found their knees, shins and ankles tended to come into sharp contact with the gleaming, X-shaped surgical-steel legs. This was a table that could - and did - kneecap the unwary. It gradually became merely a fixture.

Yet when the first marriage eventually ended, I paid for it again and took it with me, like a piece of uninterrupted, misunderstood but once-loved art. I still have it. I still dust it. I have eaten off it once in the past three years (appropriately enough, with the woman I was married to when we first bought it).

Next came another marriage. And another table. It was a coffee table. I sighted it on one of the upper floors of the Bon Marche about 20 years ago. I was coming down the escalator. It was out in the aisle, as if picked out (or kicked out) of the regular furniture displays. My jaw dropped. I gasped. I had to have it.

I ran over to it, looking for a red SOLD tag. Curious; there wasn't one. Has it been sold? I asked a passing floorwalker.

"I don't . . . think . . . so," he ventured.

It was big. Heavy looking. Pecan-colored. With a parquet top of 18 wooden squares. The legs were a bit uncommon, sort of carved into baroque scalloped patterns that reminded me vaguely of the columns surrounding the main Vatican altar inside St. Peter's. They were certainly distinctive.

I paid for it on the spot, had it awkwardly eased into the trunk of the car and drove it home in triumph with the trunk lid flapping.

My dear wife (the second one) was overcome with emotion as she helped me carry it in. She appeared speechless.

"That's the ugliest (bleep) thing I ever saw," she finally articulated when her powers of discourse returned.

I assured her she would learn to love it.

Years later, when that marriage somehow dissolved, she raised no protest (indeed, not even an eyebrow) when I took it with me. It has served me well. It is perfect for reading the Sunday paper, sections scattered, pages open, coffee cup dripping rings. I don't notice the legs much anymore; I seldom think much about the Vatican, either.

Through all those years, however, I wanted a real kitchen table, but never found the right one until recently.

I finally found my ideal kitchen table at a kitchenware store, Domaine, in Bellevue. It had to be small enough to fit alongside a smallish kitchen, without taking up too much space from the adjacent family room. It had to be clean in design, yet substantial enough to rest forearms upon while reading a newspaper. I wanted it large enough to easily seat four, or six in a pinch; I needed it small enough to serve as a bridge table; cozy enough for a candle-lit dinner for two.

The table I chose was 48 inches in diameter, with two-inch-think solid maple, unstained but finished and sealed. It's lovely, and it's washable.

I start my day at it, talk to my kids around it, do my bills and play cards on it. It's a work surface for dinner prep and a play surface for Scrabble.

How important is finding the right table?

Have you ever stroked a piece of furniture? Several times a day?

(Copyright 1996, John Hinterberger. All rights reserved.)

John Hinterberger's restaurant and food columns appear in The Seattle Times in Sunday's Pacific Magazine and Thursday's Tempo. Harley Soltes is Pacific's staff photographer.

Tables Through Time

We tend to think of tables and their uses as timeless. But they are not.

The permanent dining table is a Western invention that began in medieval times. It was preceded by the use of temporary tables - set up for the occasion with trestles and boards. "Table" (tabula) means board in Latin. Hence, room and board meant you got to sit down and eat - at the board.

Eventually a sideboard was set up for food presentation. And then they decided to have a board to store goblets and cups: the cupboard.

With all those bare planks, you had to have tablecloths. Lots of them. Diners in old Europe didn't have the neatness allowed by the use of forks until the Renaissance. Meals were eaten off four-day old cross-sections of stale bread (the predecessors of plates) with sharp knives, spoons, hands and greasy fingers. The tablecloth became a combination napkin/facecloth/handerchief.

Eventually the beauty of the table itself became a factor, when dining was moved from the common or great hall to a special room for the lord of the manor. From that point on, the "hall" shrank. In contemporary homes it lives on as the entry - often still providing a sideboard or cupboard.