How did you mark your allergy people out to staff?

We gave a list of our seating chart to the venue staff, so every waiter had a list of the names of the people at every table. We listed the allergies next to the names, if there were any. Since we assigned tables but not seats, they didn’t know what seat the allergy-person was in, but they at least knew the name of the person and what table they were at. So they could go to table 3 and ask “which one of you is John” and know John has the peanut allergy

We did the same thing as Gen. Surprisingly, no one had an allergy except me (so they knew the bride was allergic to shellfish, and we purposefully didn't serve any food that had shellfish). We had a few vegetarians though, so we made sure to indicate those.

We had a buffet but they had plated meals for those with dietary restrictions. We just told the venue what the person's restrictions were and what table they were at. The venue / serving staff was great about ensuring the folks with restrictions were properly accommodated.

Thanks everyone! I might check in with our venue to ask them what they normally do.

I guess the hard part is our set-up is big, long tables, so we can't just say 'Rufus with the peanut allergy is on table 10' and be confident the waiter only has a limited number who could be Rufus sitting there. I love the way it looks and our venue does it often, so they must have a way to deal with it.

Give a list of dietary restrictions to the staff with your final headcount when you let them know how many of each entree per table (while you were working on your seating arrangements). Often couples will use solid color tent cards (sold blank on Etsy) to designate each selection. For example, a red card will mean a beef entree, pink means chicken and green means vegan. They can be seen from a distance which stickers and ribbons cannot. You can switch up the colors to match your theme. But you give the color chart to your caterer when you give them the final headcount with any dietary restrictions.

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Thanks! This makes sense. I've also reached out to our venue to see how we can best support them/how they prefer things to be.

I gave my allergy/dietary restrictions when I gave my final count to my venue however, I also left some cutouts that I printed that either was a shrimp crossed out in red for my shellfish allergies, a plant cutout for my vegans and a chicken for those who didn't want steak and would be getting chicken. I left them by the sign in table where my seating chart was and as the guests arrived and found their table, etc. they would grab their indicated restriction and place it on top of their place setting. Our wedding was 100 guests and although the servers knew that there will be a guest at table 6 with a shellfish allergy they had no clue which of the 10 it was so seeing a big shrimp crossed out was a easy way to tell where the custom plates would go.

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That's a super cute way of doing it!

I contacted our venue and they're so good! Since they're a restaurant as well, they're very used to dealing with this stuff and told us they're all over it - to just put it on the run sheet and on our table settings and they'll do the rest.

We are giving dietary restrictions to our caterer at the same time we submit head count and meal selection (we are doing plated meals with 3 dinner options).

We are marking meals on the place cards using custom stamps. We might add additional stamps for dietary restrictions or use a different colored stamp to indicate someone has a dietary restriction. If we were going to specify what is restricted (rather than just that a restriction exists) we would need to write it in, because some guests have a lot of restrictions or really uncommon ones.

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Stamps is a great idea! and you're very right about the complexity of some - luckily ours are so far things like vegan, vegetarian, no dairy, no gluten, no chicken, no seafood, etc - so nothing super complicated or multi-tiered.