The Menu With the Letters On It

Somewhere in the RSVPs there is a note box, and somebody has typed into it in the careful way people type when they are frightened of being a nuisance. Coeliac, not a preference. Or: anaphylactic to peanuts, sorry, happy to bring my own.

Nobody wants to be that guest. Almost everybody is that guest to somebody. The aunt on dialysis. The friend eight months pregnant. The four year old who will eat exactly one beige thing. The mate who has been vegan since 2019 and has stopped mentioning it because he is tired of the conversation that follows.

So you email the venue, and back comes the sentence. We happily cater to all dietary requirements.

It is almost always true. It is almost never useful.

A promise you cannot read, and a menu you can

Of the 614 venues in this directory, 140 publish something about what they can feed people, and thirty seven of them name no diet at all. What you get instead is a sentence. Dietary requirements accommodated with prior notice. Special dietary requirements catered for upon request.

Not one of those venues is doing anything wrong, and a commercial kitchen with a good chef in it genuinely can do almost anything you ask. The trouble is what a promise cannot do. You cannot read it. You cannot hold it up against a menu and count. You cannot forward it to your aunt. And it reaches you before you have seen a single dish, just as you are deciding whether to send these people a deposit. It is the same shape as the pricing problem, and it has the same cure: publish the thing, or do not. The difference is four letters in brackets.

One Swan Valley winery puts the same legend on every menu page of its wedding kit. Meals marked (n) contain nuts, (vg) vegetarian, (v) vegan, (gf) gluten free, (gfo) gluten free option available. Then a line that tells you a real kitchen wrote it: meals may contain traces of ingredients not listed.

Read that last part twice, because it is the opposite of marketing. It is a business declining to promise something it cannot control, in the same breath as the reassurance. That is what a food business sounds like when it is being careful with somebody's airway instead of careful with its own copy.

And what the letters buy you is an evening. A kitchen table on a Sunday night, the guest list open beside the menu, four different people worked out in twenty minutes, months before anybody has paid anything. Nine canapes and your friend can eat two of them is a fact, and a fact changes what you order, or where you book. So ask for this year's menus with the codes on them, before the tour rather than after the deposit.

There is a deadline, and it is earlier than you think

The date is the part nobody warns you about, and none of it is a trick. A Sydney beachfront restaurant prints its legend with seven working days beside it. A Barossa estate asks for five. Nobody has agreed on a number, so you have to ask for it, and one Ballarat venue ties it to the menu instead: selections close a fortnight out, and the same clause is where the kitchen has to be told who cannot eat what.

A fortnight sounds early until you stand on the other side of the kitchen door. That is the week your food gets bought: the meat ordered against a number, the gluten free loaves put on somebody's list, the roster set so whoever is on the pass on Saturday already knows which plate goes where. Now think about where you are a fortnight out. You are chasing eleven people who have not replied, one of whom is your cousin, none of whom has thought to mention that a new partner is coeliac. The seating plan is not done. Two calendars, and only one of them is yours to move.

So ask for both dates at once, the final numbers and the dietary list, and whether they are the same day. Sometimes one clause covers both, and a date you only have to remember once is a date you will meet.

And the RSVP card is doing more work than it looks. Put the dietary line on it, near the top rather than in small type underneath, and set your own cut off a fortnight before the venue's. Not because anyone is being difficult, but because the last person to speak up is always the one who did not want to make a fuss.

A child has a price, and so does your photographer

Then the other half of feeding people, which nobody files under dietary requirements at all. Who counts as a head.

A Newcastle beachfront venue publishes a child at $40, which buys a children's meal, an ice cream and a soft drink package, and a teenager at $100, which buys canapes on arrival, a three course alternate serve and soft drinks. Put those two lines beside each other and the second number stops looking like a penalty. A teenager is not a child with a surcharge attached. A teenager is having the dinner everybody else is having, cooked and plated and carried out the same way, and no kitchen can make that cost less because the person eating it is young. Elsewhere a child under two is free and is not served any food, which tells you exactly what you are buying: nothing.

Your photographer, your videographer, your celebrant and the band are eating at your wedding too. Look for the line on the price list, though you will have to hunt: one venue calls it a crew meal, another a vendor meal, and a third files it under support. Inside one Melbourne estate's wedding packages a child and a supplier are the same number, $60, and it is not the same dinner: a three course children's menu or half an adult serve on one side, three courses with soft drinks only on the other. Sixty dollars reads like a lot for somebody who will not sit down for twenty minutes. Read it the other way round. Three courses out of the same kitchen, for someone who has been on their feet since eight in the morning and still has your first dance to get through, and the soft drinks are why that person is steady at ten o'clock. A meal costs what a meal costs.

So count them in at the start. A photographer, a second photographer, a videographer, a celebrant and four in the band is eight dinners. They land on your invoice rather than anybody else's, and every one of them scales with the list.

The question to ask out loud

Most of that goes in an email, and should: the menus with their codes, both deadlines, what a child costs, what a supplier meal includes. One question does not. How do you handle an allergy as opposed to a preference, and who in the kitchen owns that on the night?

A gluten free preference is a menu problem. A coeliac is a kitchen problem, and the honest answer involves a separate board, a separate pan and a named person who has been told. Nobody is asking a function venue to run like a hospital. You are asking whether the person who cooks knows the difference, and you will hear that in the way she takes the question.

Somewhere in your RSVPs, somebody is going to apologise in a small box for the way their own body works. You can hand that note to a kitchen a fortnight out and hope. Or you can book the venue that printed the letters next to the food months before you thought to ask. Only one of those is a plan, and it costs exactly nothing to prefer it.