Dinner party etiquette. There is a ton. If it's informal, it's almost kind like everything goes. If it's a formal dinner party then you are going to have service aspects with the silverware and how you serve.
The etiquette for your dinner party all depends on how formal you want your function to be.
According to Brian Hay, a chef and culinary instructor at Austin Community College and a sommelier who also teaches for the International Sommelier Guild, "If it's informal, it's almost like anything goes. If it's a formal dinner party, then you are going to have service aspects with the silverware and how you serve."
Informal or semi-formal dinner parties are easier for both the hosts and the guests becaause there isn't as much emphasis placed on rules such as how to serve, what utensil to use when, and how to pour a glass of wine.
As far as serving goes, Hay says, "The rule of thumb is if you are serving someone, you always serve from the left with your left hand and you remove dishes from the right with your right hand. But a beverage is always served with the right hand around the right side."
There are entire books written on etiquette for formal dining such as "The Art of the Table: A Complete Guide to Table Setting, Table Manners and Tableware" by Suzanne Von Drachenfels or "The Little Book of Etiquette" by Dorothea Johnson.
Unless you have had a great deal of experience with entirely formal dinner parties and know that your guests have too, you may be better off with a semi formal atmosphere.
Hay says, "The question is 'How many rules do you want to follow?' For instance, if I want to serve wine, am I just going to open the bottle and pour or am I going to follow the formal steps? If it's the formal way, there are 23 steps involved in serving a glass of wine."
Formal table settings can have over 20 pieces of flatware and dishes. The different pieces include: dinner plate, salad plate, bread and butter plate, wine glass, water glass, cup, saucer, soup bowl, dinner fork, salad fork, oyster (seafood) fork, fish fork, desert fork, fruit fork, dinner knife, fish knife, steak knife, butter knife, fruit knife, dinner spoon, teaspoon, consomme spoon, soup spoon, grapefruit spoon, demitasse spoon, iced tea spoon, and dessert spoon. Extremely formal dinners may also contain finger bowls. Of course you might not be using all of these utensils. For example if you are not serving any seafood, you wouldn't need the fish knife, the fish fork, or the seafood fork, but these are examples of all the silverware you could actually use.
For people who haven't ever attended a formal dinner party of this magnitude, the rules of etiquette may be confusing. You don't want people to be spending so much time worrying about doing "the right thing" that they don't have time to have fun and enjoy themselves. Someone not familiar with these rules of etiquette, may feel out of place, or even worse, embarrassed.
Formal dinners can be carried off successfully and yet still simply. You can get by with far less silverware, therefore eliminating the confusion or embarrassment of any of your guests. It's your party; you make the rules.
