Wedding Meal Choice Wording: Entrée Examples for Cards and Online RSVPs

Meal choice is the part of the RSVP where wording mistakes turn directly into day-of problems: a guest who circled two entrées, a card with one checkmark for a family of four, a vegan discovered at table twelve. The fix is almost entirely in how you ask.

Here's the wording that works, for both printed cards and online forms.

Wording the entrées themselves

Short, concrete, appetizing. Two or three words per option:

Please indicate your entrée preference:

☐ Herb-Roasted Chicken ☐ Grilled Salmon ☐ Wild Mushroom Risotto (v)

Or with a touch more formality:

Kindly select one entrée per guest

___ Beef Tenderloin ___ Pan-Seared Salmon ___ Seasonal Vegetable Tart (vegetarian)

Rules that save headaches:

• Mark the vegetarian/vegan option with "(v)" or the word itself. Guests who need it scan for it.
• Don't oversell. "Chicken — a succulent pan-roasted breast with a lemon-thyme jus over pommes purée" reads beautifully and fits on nothing.
• Kids' meals: if offered, list it as its own line ("Children's meal — chicken tenders") so parents don't burn an adult entrée count on a six-year-old.

The per-guest problem (printed cards)

The classic failure: one card, one set of checkboxes, four guests. You get back a card with "2 chicken 1 fish" scrawled in a margin and no idea who's who — which matters at plated service, where the server needs to know which seat gets the salmon.

The standard fix is the initials convention:

Please initial your entrée selection:

____ Chicken ____ Salmon ____ Risotto

with a line under the guest names ("M.H. — Salmon, J.H. — Chicken"). Spell the instruction out; guests don't know the convention unless you tell them.

Wording it on an online RSVP

Online forms remove the per-guest ambiguity mechanically — each named guest gets their own dropdown — so your wording only needs to be human:

Meal preference (choose one per guest) Sarah: [ Chicken ▾ ] Plus-one: [ Salmon ▾ ]

And because forms are interactive, you can add the question that printed cards never have room for:

Anything we should tell the kitchen? Allergies, dietary restrictions, or anything you can't eat.

That single free-text line — separate from the entrée choice — catches the gluten-free cousin, the shellfish allergy, and the guest who's newly vegan, without you having to enumerate every possibility as a checkbox. For the full list of questions worth asking on the form, see wedding RSVP questions to ask.

Dietary restrictions: ask separately, always

Whether paper or digital, don't fold restrictions into the entrée list ("☐ Chicken ☐ Fish ☐ Dietary restriction"). A restriction isn't a meal — a guest can want the chicken and be allergic to the almonds on it. The wording that works:

Please note any allergies or dietary restrictions: ____________

Your caterer will thank you for the distinction: they plan counts from entrées and exceptions from the restriction list.

What the caterer actually needs

All of this wording serves one deliverable, due about two weeks out:

1. Per-entrée totals — 62 chicken, 41 salmon, 11 risotto
2. The exceptions list — "Table 4, seat 2: nut allergy; Table 9, seat 6: gluten-free"
3. Kids' meals and vendor meals as separate line items

If replies arrive as cards and texts, plan a tallying session (and a re-tallying session after the late replies). If they arrive through an RSVP tracker, the per-entrée totals maintain themselves and export as a CSV with the dietary notes attached — the deliverable already in deliverable shape.

A restriction isn't a meal — a guest can want the chicken and be allergic to the almonds on it.

Putting it together

On paper: short entrée names, initials convention, a separate restrictions line. Online: per-guest dropdowns, a free-text kitchen question, and totals that add themselves up.

KnotUploader's Celebration plan includes meal preferences and custom questions on your RSVP page, live per-entrée counts on your dashboard, and CSV export for the caterer — alongside the QR-code photo gallery your guests fill on the day. One payment, valid a full year; see pricing.