Digital Invitation for a Christening: Menu and Allergies

Forty-five people at a christening lunch, in the back room of a restaurant. The grandmother doesn't eat shellfish. Your cousin is coeliac. Two children can't have lactose. Nobody is going to write that on a slip of paper and hand it back folded in a pocket. That's the problem a digital invitation for a christening has to solve: where the menu lives, and where a guest says I can't eat this. You can set it up today from the catalogue and send the link before the kitchen has confirmed the last course, then edit the line when it does.

The mistake is never the menu. It's leaving the menu and the allergy note out of the invitation, so every question ends up in a different phone call. Here's the order that works, plus one sentence you can copy.

A christening invitation is not an allergy form

Look at what happens when the only instruction is please confirm your attendance. The shellfish question goes to your mother. The gluten question goes to the family group chat. The lactose question goes to whoever has the restaurant's email. By the Thursday before, you're holding four allergies in your head and none of them where the chef can see them.

• The menu, course by course, exactly as the restaurant serves it: starter, main, dessert. Not a generic christening menu.
• A vegetarian line confirmed by the kitchen before you publish anything. If it isn't confirmed, it isn't on the invitation yet.
• One sentence for allergies, with a phone number and a deadline that gives the caterer time: ten days before is workable.
• The name of the person who answers that number. Mother, father or godparent, not the family in general.

Christening invitation allergies: announce the menu, channel the rest

Put the menu on the invitation as the kitchen serves it. A guest reading it at 11pm on the bus should know whether the main is fish or chicken. The invitation is text you write yourself, scene by scene, so the menu is exactly as accurate as your last call with the restaurant.

What you don't write is menu adapted to any allergy. That's the caterer's promise, not yours. Instead, name one channel: any food allergies or intolerances, message [name] on [number] by [date]. A phone number does in two minutes what a form can't — it lets the chef ask a question back.

Show the menu as the kitchen serves it. Put the allergy note beside it with one phone number. Then leave the invitation alone.

Why a digital invitation sorts this out in one link

The link is the invitation. Guests open it in the browser on their phone, with no app to install, and they read the menu and the allergy note in the same place they read the time and the address. If the restaurant swaps the dessert or confirms a gluten-free plate, you edit that line and the link stays the same. Nobody reprints an envelope or forwards a new photo of a card. Confirmations arrive in one ordered list inside the invitation, so you know how many are coming to the table, and the specific allergies get closed one by one through the number you named. The site runs in seven languages, Portuguese included, and the invitation content can be set per language, so a Portuguese-speaking family reads the note the way they'd write it.

Close the menu and the allergy note before you send anything. With a digital invitation for a christening you get one link that shows the menu, collects the replies and gets corrected without a reprint. Try a design free and publish it once the kitchen confirms the last dish.