It's reassuring to a food geek, of course, that such a specialised piece of kit exists. Yet the idea that a culinary Pythia of Kinsman's stature had to connect with a worldwide network of food nerds to find out what the hell she was eating with means something is a little out of whack. As she puts it, "I felt in the presence of exceptional schmanciness."

Any way you look at it, the use of utensils at table is culturally specific. In our own history, it was common to carry a knife in readiness for food. Only in the 17th century did the fork finally reach the English aristocracy, by way of France and Italy. Even then, it was regarded as an affectation and occasionally banned by the Church in various parts of Europe as an affront to God. The use of cutlery by ordinary people wasn't common in England until the 18th century, when cheaper methods of mass production began to make such aspirational objects more widely available.

Like pretty much everything else the English have adopted, we quickly made cutlery into a class signifier. Throughout the Georgian and Victorian periods place settings expanded with great armouries of increasingly specialised and elaborately decorated utensils. Some, such as the soup spoon – with a wide, deep bowl and offset to remain level when bringing the soup to the mouth – were fantastically useful when eating socially and sumptuously dressed. Others, such as the fish knife – supposed to be useful in separating and lifting off cooked fillets – were worse than useless and became symbolic of arriviste ostentation. Perhaps this is the root of the longstanding rumour in foodie circles that the royal household doesn't use fish knives (though they do appear at formal banquets). The Buckingham Palace press office politely "refuse to confirm or deny" this.

John Betjeman's poem "How to Get on in Society" ruthlessly minces such pretensions, listing fish knives, serviettes, frills on cutlets, cruets, pastry forks and doilies. That's six references to place settings in a 20-line poem widely regarded as one of the wittier comments on the British class distinction. Let's face it, as a nation we're probably more obsessed with what's set around our plates than we are with what's on them.

The haute cuisine restaurant is the exemplar of the notion that to dine well, one must lay the table well. My chance to understand the extent of contemporary table theatre came when I was offered a place on "The Art of Fine Dining" masterclass at the three-star Alain Ducasse restaurant at The Dorchester. The dining room contains what is often billed as the most beautiful table in London, "Table Lumière", which is "surrounded by a luminescent oval curtain of 4,500 shimmering fibre optics" and equipped with what I can only describe as the Mother of All Sideboards, a floor-to-ceiling display cabinet containing the three sets of Hermès china, Puiforcat silverware and Saint-Louis crystal from which diners can select their own settings. Table Lumière also has its own separate dishwasher: that's a man, not an appliance.

Nicolas Defrémont, the effortlessly suave restaurant director, dressed me in a brown overall and a pair of cotton gloves and took me through the process of setting one of the more ordinary tables. Table and chairs are aligned to the geometry of the room and centred under individual pools of light. The tablecloth is ironed into position. Crockery and cutlery are wheeled to the table on a special cart and polished individually, before being laid out using a complex system of measures based on the width of a finger (God help you if you don't have Michelin-approved digits). As each piece is placed relative to the last, a simple error of millimetres at the beginning of the set-up can snowball, resulting in the whole table having to be reset. Defrémont believes that a setting should actually be as simple as possible – there's no terrifying phalanx of weaponry these days. The starter instruments are laid on either side of the "show" or decorative plate and the waiter will exchange them for the correct bespoke tools according to your order.