Place Card Logistics

There’s a few ways to do this.


1) you can use diff color for the cards or color fonts that represents the entree choices. And provide that to the caterer 2) have assigned seatings and provide the meal choices of each guests along with the exact seating charts

In addition to sharing a seating chart with their selections, I used stickers (ordered on Etsy, but there are also options on Amazon) in different shapes (chicken, cow, pasta, carrot, etc) to represent each meal and any dietary restrictions. I placed them on the bottom right hand corner.

View Quoted Comment And I've seen that for the entree, but my worry is for the starter and the dessert as well? 3 icons seems excessive to me 😂

View Quoted Comment Oh! I didn’t realize they get to pick each course. All of the plated dinners I’ve attended (and ours) asked guests to choose their entree, and the chef or the couple picked the other courses to complement their entree choice. With that being said, you can get the stickers in a variety of sizes. But, if you don’t want to have that many, perhaps, in addition to a seating chart, indicate the number of each course at each table (Table 1: 4 soups, 4 salads, 1 beef, 3 chickens, 2 pastas, etc).

This is something to talk to your caterers about, most places have a preference/standard way of doing things. I’ve never heard of guests pre-selecting 3 separate courses, so I wouldn’t be surprised if your catering has a go to way of dealing with that

Your second option with the different colors is easiest on you and on waitstaff. The colors should be different, not in the same family, to tell them apart from a distance. Say your colors are red, pink and green. Red is for beef, pink is for chicken and green is for vegan. Then let the caterer/restaurant contact know what your color code is so that waitstaff doesn’t have to ask each guest who may not remember what they ordered. Being able to see the colors from a distance is easy, identifying small stickers or rubber stamps from a 10’ + distance is impossible and orders will get mixed up.


Pre-selecting entrees is pretty common in many areas where the couple has to pick 2 from a list of 10 or so. Table side ordering is pretty much only done in the NYC area. Unless you are going to a restaurant as a walk in or a regular reservation of a large group, for parties renting out banquet rooms, they will have you select 2-3 main meals from a preset list.

Some good ideas here, from a server perspective, color of card is much easier to decifer in comparison to font, especially if you’re trying to keep things seamless. A great option would be to have a small symbol on each card for what they’re eating. For example, a little cow for beef, fish for seafood, carrot for vegetarian, chicken for chicken, and so on..

Our menu is similar - our caterers will have a copy of the seating chart for reference in the back. We aren't doing place cards. It's just how our venue handles it

Definitely ask your caterer! We did assigned seating and I submitted the seating charts and entrée choices to my caterer, but they still asked for the meal choice to be indicated on the place cards in some way! (We did a subtle colored dot in either gold, silver, or black!)

Hi everyone! So, I massively overthought this. Just got off the phone with the restaurant and as long as I denote the entree choice, they can take care of the rest!

I have 5 entrees everyone could have chosen from, so I'm thinking of maybe doing tags like the inspo picture and doing a different ribbon color for each entree? Or maybe a different paint color for the name..? I'll have to go see what the craft store has in terms of ribbon!

I would make sure to have place cards. You can have little symbols in the corner to state what each person ordered. That or have different colored ribbons that are your wedding colors correlating to the meals they selected.