Escort/name Plate - Plated Dinner Help!

Maybe spray paint them? theyre so pretty.

Those are nice, but whatever you use needs to be left on the table and readily viewable by the servers. I have a feeling many of those wooden names would go straight into a purse or tossed to the center of the table. Name cards are used to prevent this. You could use different color ink on the crds to indicate the entree, or different color cards.

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This! If that was on my plate I wouldn't have any idea it indicated my food choice and it would go in my purse to not get lost.

Those are pretty and I agree with the PP that you could possibly spray paint the ones you need in a different color. Or if you decide to use place cards you could use a legend which is what I did. Since my invitation suite used trees I used trees for my legend. My legend was 3 trees = beef, 2 trees = salmon, and 1 tree = chicken. I gave that legend to the coordinator who gave it to the servers.

Are you still planning to use your seating chart? Guests still need to be directed to their tables even with place cards so you could still use it.

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I agree too. If I saw this I'd be like "Aww what a super cute little gift for me" and it would be in my bag way before dinner service started.

Those are very pretty. Can you attach a colored gem to signify the meal choice? Of if you are assigning seats can you give the staff a table diagram with the guests meal selection.

They are beautiful! If they are wood, I would just spray paint the ones that you need the third color for.

So here is what I am doing because I wanted to avoid doing a seating chart all together. It is very time consuming but I am doing it early enough that it won’t be so bad. For the toast I will have champagne flutes filled already with guest names on a table. They take their name to the table and it will have a small escort acrylic on top of the flute that will show a sign for fish since I only have two options. Chicken or fish. Here is a picture for an idea. Hope this helps. Good luck.

Could you possibly seat them by meal choice? Everyone that has chicken at odd table numbers, fish at even, veggie with low centerpieces or by napkin colors something like that.

Yes I agree with the others that say it will go in the purse. I also have never seen a place card with a chicken or beef outline on it. Usually it would be a color dot in the bottom corner or even simply writing “Chicken” “Beef or whatever the options are.

Also im not sure what your budget is but laser cut names are fairly expensive and what if you have two Ashley’s at a table? How will each Ashley know whose is whose. Just minor logistical things that could make these laser cut
names a nightmare.

Name tents are are very inexpensive and you won’t notice them at all in the overall decor of your table.

I am in the same boat. I have a gorgeous name board for table assignments and simple elegant font black and white name cards at the table for food assignments.

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That would not be a good idea because then you would be separating families and couples and it would be awkward to be placed at a table where you don't really know the other people.

Something my coordinator told me to think about: if you are going to be having your dinner in a dimly lit room, the waiters will have trouble clearly seeing the colors if you choose to color code rather than use symbols. May not be a concern for you though depending on your lighting!

Beautiful idea and if you could make other things work like pp have mentioned ( double names, cost, guests leaving them on table) then I would say just paint them.

What is your theme? I’m doing a mixture of garden/rustic/romantic so I’m using different colored flowers that match our wedding colors - Pink for chicken, Gray for beef, Ivory for vegetarian, etc.

Also you will still need your seating chart so guests know what table they are at, so no worries there. You can just leave the place cards with meal choice at the tables.

This is just a rough mock up. My place cards came with a template to print the names on there so it will look cleaner.

Whoops. Picture didn’t post

Won’t the name plates be more expensive?

If you do place cards, you can use colored crystal stickers, instead of animals. What we did was no crystal meant beef (choose the most popular meal for “no sticker” because less work for you & staff will just look for the stickers as the different options).