Meal Indicators for Coaster Place Cards

Could you do different color writing? For example, red writing would mean cow.

Different colored writing is a great idea. That should make it easy enough for serving staff to see who gets what.

If it's acrylic, are you doing a backwash of paint? Here's an example...

If so, keeping in line with your color scheme is totally achievable, as long as the servers have a key to the meals and the corresponding colors (ex: green = chicken, pink = salmon, blush = vegetarian, etc.). Even giving them a sample set of coasters with meal labels would be a nice way to help ensure everyone gets their meal choice.

I love both of the above ideas (different color writing or different color background)! Another idea is to have different coaster shapes (square, circle, hexagon, etc) to represent the different meal choices, which would also help the staff determine who gets which meal.