Wedding Invitations With a Menu Choice: Two Boxes

The caterer calls three weeks out and wants numbers: how many beef, how many fish. You start digging through WhatsApp for the answer. Forty messages, two screenshots of somebody else's menu and a notebook with half the names crossed out. Somewhere in there is your cousin's reply about the fish.

That count has to come from somewhere you can read in one pass, not from a conversation you have to rebuild. That's what the RSVP inside a digital invitation is for: the question and the answer sit under the same name, in the same list.

Ask for the menu before you plan the tables

Menus usually get decided before the seating plan, because the kitchen wants a count before the venue wants a layout. So the menu question belongs in the invitation itself — the same link people already opened to check the time and the address. Add a deadline in the text while you're there: tell me your choice by Friday 15 June. People answer when you give them a date and tell them where to answer.

• Write the dishes as they'll come out of the kitchen: 'sirloin in Pedro Ximénez sauce or sea bass baked in salt', not 'option A' and 'option B'.
• Put the deadline in the same block as the menu question. At the very bottom, after the map, is where things stop getting answered.
• Ask one menu question with both options written out. Anything that doesn't fit — a guest who can't eat gluten, a child who only eats pasta — goes in a question you write, read and settle with the caterer yourself.
• Go through the reply list the day before you close it, before you give the kitchen the final count.

Wedding invitations with a menu choice: one question, two boxes

Two options are plenty. Five turn the RSVP into a survey, and half your guests answer the first line and forget the rest. One main-course question with two boxes gets a clean answer, and the replies land inside the invitation in an ordered list — name and choice on one screen, not spread across chat, email and missed calls.

If you're serving the same menu to everyone, write the dishes into the dinner scene — 'ham starter, sea bass in salt, cheesecake' — and skip the question. There's nothing to choose. You write the RSVP questions yourself while you set the invitation up, so the wording sounds like you and not like a form.

Two boxes and a date get answered. A menu poll in the group chat gets buried by Sunday.

Changing a dish on Tuesday doesn't mean resending anything

Your aunt calls on Monday to say she doesn't eat fish, and you settle that with the caterer. Then you decide to swap the sea bass for aubergine, open the editor on Tuesday and change the text. Everyone opens the same link and sees the current version. The same goes for the time, the address, the map or the dress code: nothing gets reprinted, no second envelope goes out, nobody has to hunt for an old invitation. What the link won't do is chase a guest who hasn't answered. If a change affects one person, message them. The reply list tells you who.

What the link does, and what it doesn't

It's digital, so nothing is printed or posted. If your grandmother keeps invitations in a drawer, the sensible middle ground is a link for everyone and a few printed copies for the people who'll keep them. Guests need a phone, a tablet or a computer with a connection — anyone without one goes on the printed list. And there are no automatic reminders. The one that works is the date you wrote in the invitation.

Write the two dishes, set one date, and let the answers arrive in a single list. When the caterer asks for the count, you'll have it with names attached — not in a notebook with names crossed out.