Service à la française (French: [sɛʁvis a la fʁɑ̃sɛːz]; "service in the French style") is the practice of serving various dishes of a meal at the same time, with the diners helping themselves from the serving dishes. That contrasts to service à la russe ("service in the Russian style") in which dishes are brought to the table sequentially and served individually, portioned by servants.^{[1] [2]}

Formal dinners were served à la française from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, but in modern times it has been largely supplanted by service à la russe in restaurants. Service à la française still exists today in the form of the buffet, and remains popular for small and large gatherings in homes, companies, hotels, and other group settings. It is also similar to the Chinese style of serving large groups in many Chinese restaurants.

The formalized service à la française was a creation of the Baroque period, helped by the growth of published cookbooks setting out grand dining as it was practiced at the French court, led by François Pierre de la Varenne's Le Cuisinier françois (1651) and Le Pâtissier françois (1653). As in other matters of taste and fashion, France took over from Italy as the leader of Europe, and by the 18th century the French style was diffused across the rest of Europe, and those who could afford them hired French chefs.^[3]

Over the course of the 19th century, service à la française was replaced by service à la russe in grand dining. This had the advantage of making the food much hotter when it reached the diner, and reducing the huge number of dishes and condiments previously found on the table at the same time. It also ensured that everybody could taste everything they wanted, which in practice the old system often did not allow. On the other hand, the effect of magnificent profusion was reduced, and many more footmen and more tableware were required, making it an option only the rich could afford. It also reduced the time spent at the table, and the amount of food needed.^[4]

The meal was divided into two, three or four courses, "removes" or "services": soup and fish; meat entrées; and desserts, all with various side dishes. A supper, long after the main dinner, might just have one course, plus dessert.^[5][6] Each course included a variety of dishes, all set at the same time at the table. Guests served themselves and their neighbours; the men were generally supposed to help the ladies next to them. The table was set and the first remove placed on the table before the guests entered the dining room. The serving dishes might be removed after the first course of soup or fish, or not. They were always cleared after the entrées, before serving dessert,^[7] except for a period in the mid-18th century, when at grand meals the desserts were placed in the centre of the table from the start of the meal.^[8]

There was supposed, by the cookery books, to be a more or less fixed ratio of around four dishes per diner, all different. Unlike today, when doubling the number of diners from say 12 to 24 will normally mean doubling the quantity prepared of each type of food, service à la française doubled the number of different dishes of all types, to about 96.^[9] Therefore, in a large dinner, there was no chance for every diner to taste everything on the table, and two diners at different points around the table might well both have a hearty dinner, without tasting any of the same food, as with a large modern buffet. But whereas in the Middle Ages and Renaissance the best food was placed on the table with the most important diners, or the centre of a very large table, the lesser tables or edges of the main table doing rather less well, now the quality of food was even across the table. But now only diners accepted as more or less of the same status eat in the same room at all.^[10]

In practice, guests might not be aware of what all the many dishes on the table were, or be able to see or obtain them. The long account in a letter from a young American lady of a dinner for 18 people on New Year's Day 1852 at an aristocratic English country house,^[a] includes "I cannot tell you how many kinds of soup there were. Suffice it, that mine was most delicious".^[11]

In the Renaissance the dessert course might be served in a different room, or at the other end of a large room, sometimes in buffet style.

Service à la française sometimes required so much food to be set out that it was the custom of some hosts to have a second dinner party the following day, using what was left over for a slightly smaller number of less-important guests. William Makepeace Thackeray's character Major Pendennis (1850) is "indignant at being invited to a 'second-day dinner'".^[12]

Until about 1800, no glasses or drinks were on the table at the start of the meal. Footmen were beckoned and brought a salver with a glass of wine, and a decanter of water to dilute it if desired.^[13]

The “Classical Order” of table service emerged in France in the early 17th century and first appeared in print in 1651 in La Varenne’s Le Cuisinier françois. The Classical meal is composed of five stages: potage, entrée, roast, entremets, and dessert. Each stage is characterized by certain types of dishes largely unique to that stage, each distinguished from the other by their ingredients, cooking methods, and serving temperatures. The distinctions between the stages were at first loosely observed, or perhaps more accurately, the "rules" were in a formative stage for several decades. By the early 18th century, though, the stages of the meal were increasingly rigid.^[14]

Each stage could be presented in a separate course, or the stages could be grouped together to produce a meal of fewer courses. Regardless of the presentation on the table, the stages of the meal were consumed in the same order, known to those attending the meal but rarely evident in contemporaneous menus or descriptions of meals.^[15]

The meal consistently began with potages.^[16]

Entrées on meat days^[b] included butchers' meats (but not ham), suckling pig, domestic fowl, furred and feathered game, and offal. Entrées were typically cooked in moist heat in preparations such as sautés, ragoûts, and fricassées. Meat or fowl might be roasted, but they were always finished in a sauce. Other common entrées were meat pies and fritters. On lean days, fish and eggs replaced meat and fowl in every course. In Lent, though, eggs were not served at any meal until the 19th century, when eggs became increasingly common in Lent. Vegetables were used only in sauces or garnishes; they were not served as a separate dish in the entrée stage of the meal, even on lean days. All entrées were served hot, which was a salient feature of entrées until the 19th century.^[17]

In the 18th century, the bouilli, a joint of boiled beef, was the first entrée consumed at the meal after the potages. By the 1820s, the bouilli was no longer routinely served at fine dinners.^[18]

The relevé was in origin an entrée, a spit-roasted joint served in a sauce and consumed after the other entrées. By the late 18th century, relevés had come to be considered a distinct stage of the meal consisting of any large joint consumed after the other entrées. On lean days, relevés were typically whole fish served in a sauce, and in the 19th century, whole fish became a classic relevé, even on meat days. Also in the 19th century, relevés came to be served before the other entrées rather than after, essentially replacing the bouilli formerly consumed at that point in the meal.^[19]

In the early 18th century, hors d’œuvres were little extra dishes served alongside both entrées and entremets, typically consumed at the end of the given course. They were at first considered to be small entrées or entremets; but by the late 18th century, hors d’œuvre had come to be considered a distinct stage of the meal that was consumed immediately after the potages and before the entrées and relevés.^[20]

Roasts on meat days included domestic fowl, feathered game, and small furred game. The fowl and game were spit-roasted and nicely browned, served "dry" and not in a sauce or ragoût, although sauces might be served separately. Large cuts of roasted butcher's meat and furred game were not served in the roast course until well into the 19th century. On lean days, whole fish replaced meat-day roasts, but the fish were poached or fried, not roasted. The fish were substitutions or counterparts to the roasts served on meat days, corresponding to their position in the meal but not their cooking method. The fish for the roast course were served "dry", often with the scales still attached, and sauces might be served on the side, as for roasts on meat days.^[21]

Salads were served with the roast. Salads were often considered to be a sort of entremets, but they were usually mentioned separately from the other entremets.^[22]

Entremets were the last dishes served from the kitchen. They were a varied selection of chilled meats, hot vegetables, hot and cold sweet dishes, and other dishes like vegetable and cheese fritters.^[23]

Dessert consisted of items "from the storeroom" (de l'office), including fresh, stewed, preserved, and dried fruits; fruit jellies; cheese and other dairy dishes; dry biscuits (cookies) and wafers; and, beginning in the mid-18th century, ices and petits fours.^[24][25] Because the dishes in the dessert course were not prepared in the kitchen, dessert was often not included on menus or in descriptions of meals, and the stated number of courses was thus often fewer by one than the actual number of courses served.^[26]

Beginning in the early 19th century, the meal often included a small glass of chilled spirits or frozen punch between courses at the midpoint of the meal. In a 4-course meal, it was typically served after the roast, and in a 3-course meal, before the roast. The drink, the coup du milieu, was not considered a distinct stage of the meal and was not often included on menus.^[27]

The stages of the meal could be presented in 5, 4, or 3 courses. Some meals, particularly meals other than dinner, were presented in a single course, a distinct type of service called an ambigu.

While there are many variations in the details, the following arrangements are characteristic of meals from the mid-17th century to the late 19th-century. Note that hors d'œuvres and relevés in the descriptions were not distinct stages of the meal in the 17th century. Note also that in the 19th century, relevés were increasingly served before the other entrées, not after them.^[28]

Meals with five courses are attested from the mid-17th to the mid-18th century by La Varenne (1651),^[29] Pierre de Lune (1662),^[30] Louis Liger (1711),^[31] François Marin (1739),^[32] and Menon (1739).^[33]

1. Potage + hors d'œuvre
2. Entrée + relevé
3. Roast + salad
4. Entremets
5. Dessert

Meals with four courses are attested from the mid-17th to the early-19th century by L.S.R (1674),^[34] Jean Ribou (1708),^[35] Menon (1739),^[36] Menon (1746),^[37] Dictionnaire portatif de cuisine, d’office, et de distillation (1767),^[38] and Grimod de La Reynière (1805).^[39]

1. Potage + hors d’œuvre + entrée + relevé
2. Roast + salad
3. Entremets
4. Dessert

Meals with three courses are attested from the mid-16th to the late-19th century by François Massialot (1691),^[40] Nicolas Audiger (1692),^[41] Menon (1746),^[42] Manuel de Gastronomie (1825),^[43] Urbain Dubois (1856),^[44] and Dictionnaire universel de la Vie pratique à la ville et à la campagne (1882).^[45] Beginning in the early 19th century, meals of three courses were the most common type of table service.^[43]

1. Potage + hors d’œuvre + entrée + relevé
2. Roast + salad + entremets
3. Dessert

A modified form of service à la française is known as "family-style" in less formal restaurants. This form of service replicates the way in which small family meals are sometimes served.

The buffet style is a variation of the French service in which all of the food is available, at the correct temperature, in a serving space other than the dining table, and guests serve themselves.

Buffets can vary from the informal (a gathering of friends in a home, or the serving of brunch at a hotel) to the formal setting of a wedding reception. The "buffet" format is preferred on occasions where a very large number of guests is to be accommodated efficiently by a small number of service personnel.

• Degustation
• Silver service
• Small plates
• Tasting menu

• All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present by Stephen Mennell. University of Illinois, 1995.
• The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners by Margaret Visser. New York: Penguin Books, 1992.
• Food in History by Reay Tannahill. New York: Crown, 1995.
• Patrick Rambourg, Histoire de la cuisine et de la gastronomie françaises, Paris, Ed. Perrin (coll. tempus n° 359), 2010, 381 pages. ISBN 978-2-262-03318-7
• "A la Française: the Waning of a Long Dining Tradition" by Peter Brears, in Luncheon, Luncheon and Other Meals - Eating with the Victorians, Ed. C. Anne Wilson, 1992. Alan Sutton Publishing, Dover.
• Service à la Française by Peter Hertzmann, 2004 on his website: https://www.hertzmann.com/articles/2004/service/