How to eat cheese? You may be asking yourself, why would I need instructions on how to eat cheese. But really, there are many etiquette rules to eating cheese in France. First there is the order in which you cut the cheese. (For those of you 10-year-olds snickering right now, I revise the sentence to say slice the cheese.) You need to first start by cutting, or slicing, the hardest cheese and then go to the next hardest cheese and then to the softest. This way, you’re not putting gooey soft cheese on the hard cheese. Another point of etiquette, if you are lucky enough to ever be able to go to a restaurant with a cheese cart, is very important to note. After your appetizer (“entrée”) and your main course (“plat de resistance”), comes the cheese course. The waiter rolls out a cart of cheeses, or maybe just offers you a platter of cheeses to choose from. Of course, you’ve never seen many of these cheeses, and you want to try all of them! Who wouldn’t? But no, no and again, no. You must only choose three. Any more and it is considered rude. Any fewer than three, and you are considered strange. So, I recommend that you choose three.
