Gala Dinner Invitations With Allergies: A Useful Guide

The starter lands at table four and your guest goes quiet. She's allergic to hazelnuts. The chef didn't know. Now there's a plate in front of her she can't touch, and eleven people at the table are waiting to see what she does.

Nobody did anything wrong. What's missing is one question asked at the right moment, written down properly and handed to the kitchen before the shopping is done. That's the real job behind gala dinner invitations with allergies.

Ask about allergies when guests reply, not the week after

The RSVP is the moment. Wait until the week of the dinner and the chef has already ordered, which turns a tasting menu into an improvisation. Ask early, ask once, and make the answer easy to give.

• Ask it plainly: 'Do you have any allergy or intolerance the menu should avoid?' — 'Any dietary requirements?' gets skimmed.
• Ask in the singular. One clear question per guest beats a general request fired at the whole table.
• If someone answers 'I don't think so', come back to them seven days before the dinner. Allergies change; so do memories.
• Keep every answer in the same place. An allergy that lives in a chat disappears into that chat.

The menu is built with names, not statistics

A chef can work with 'Table 4, no nuts'. A chef can't do anything with 'someone has an allergy'. Names and table numbers turn a fact into an instruction the kitchen can follow on the night.

Make the difference clear between a serious allergy and a preference, too. Gluten-free by choice isn't the same as coeliac disease, and a kitchen handles them differently. Agree one alternative plate for each common allergy — nuts, shellfish, lactose — and confirm it in writing with the venue.

An allergy only counts once it has a name, a table and a plate the chef has agreed to.

One channel keeps allergies out of the group chat

Open one thread or one email for allergies only, separate from the dinner group. In the group, a message about a shellfish allergy sits between stickers and voice notes, and nobody scrolls back to find it. Give a visible deadline as well: 'I need this by 15 May' works better than 'let me know when you can'. And when someone confirms without mentioning allergies, send the same line back every time: 'Just checking — no allergies or intolerances on your side?'

Talk to the venue like another guest

Send the chef a final list ten days before the dinner: name, allergy, table. Ask for written confirmation that the menu covers each one. At a Swiss venue your guests might speak German, French and Italian, and the kitchen team may not share a single language, so send the list in the language the kitchen works in. On the night, a small card at the setting or a signal agreed with the maître means nobody has to announce their allergy across the table.

Your allergy list lives in an email. Everything else can live in one link. A Send The Joy invitation is a web page you share with a link, a QR code or a message; guests reply from their phone without installing anything, and you decide which questions the RSVP form asks. The confirmations arrive in one ordered list inside the invitation, and if you change the time, the place or the dress code, you edit the invitation and the link stays the same — nobody gets a second message. Then send the chef the list, and go and get dressed.