AIBU to be a menu Bridezilla?

[ThePlanningOhGodThePlanning]

Advice please.
Wedding reception for about 110 people.
Venue have asked us to choose the following
A main set 3 course meal (which include meat or fish)
A set vegetarian alternative
A set children's alternative (there are about 8 children under 10 being invited)

They will also accommodate other essential requirements like gluten free / vegan.
We need to know what people want in advance.
We want to ensure that people's ethical or medical food requirements are met, but we don't half the guests going "off piste" cos they're "not keen" on something. Leave it to the side then!

We plan to put an insert in with the main invitation re food choices.

What we WANT to write is....
Listen up people!
There is a set menu for the carnivores. Please stick to it.
There is a set menu for the vegetarians. Please stick to it.
There is a set menu for the children, if little Jimmy doesn't like chicken and chips, there is a Macdonald's by the roundabout at the M69 junction.
Please don't ask me to mess with the menu for over a hundred people cos you've decided to go Low Carb for this one week, but you will be living on bread and pizza until then.
But if you genuinely have Coeliac disease, of course I will order a gluten free menu for you because the last thing I want to do is wipe out your intestinal Villi for the next six months

Obviously, I won't write that. But I need to get that across in a much more polite and socially acceptable way.

It's a second wedding so I am of the generation where you ate what you were given and left anything you didn't like on the side of the plate.

Any suggestions for wordings that you have used that have helped you avoid Menu Option Hell

Many thanks from a Bridezilla in waiting

Pandering to their nonsense only encourages it. AND makes your wedding more expensive!

Bollocks.

If you're catering £50 per head you cater £50 per head. It's cheaper per head to make five gf meals than one. And if the meal contains as many elements as possible from the standard (eg everyone has the same potatoes and vegetable stack but you make a gf vegan gravy) then it's minimum work and minimum green-eyed whingeing from other guests.

Some people don't go to very many formal meals, and it shows. Doesn't anyone watch Masterchef to see what the competing factors are when you're serving a hundred people at once?

And the problem with people taking their own food is because venues don't allow you to have guests bringing a picnic. You eat the venues food or you don't go.

My best friend got the caterer to ring me. When she realised my food issues were quite difficult she asked me to take my own! My friend was fine with it!

He - in my experience it's far better for the person with the special diet to speak directly to the venue, yes. Out of interest, did they plate up what you brought, or did you brandish an Asterix lunchbox at the crucial moment?

And if the meal contains as many elements as possible from the standard (eg everyone has the same potatoes and vegetable stack but you make a gf vegan gravy) then it's minimum work and minimum green-eyed whingeing from other guests.

This is what we had at ours - starter was GF anyway, for the main they just didn't put pigs in blankets & yorkie pud on the plate for us fussy eaters gluten free and everyone had GF gravy, and then for pudding three of us just had a different pudding off the menu that just happened to be GF. Everyone else got apparently-amazing chocolate cake so there were no green-eyed monsters

I honestly couldn't be arsed weeding out who wants GF because of medical reasons and who doesn't. In the end we had one coeliac (me), one intolerant and one allergy. Made no difference to us or the venue what the reasons for wanting GF were, and they didn't charge us any more than the standard meal cost.

With our wedding we had to deal with allergies and 'intolerances' for the following

Nuts
Gluten
tomatoes
strawberries
whatever it is that makes pate pate (i think it was rennet, which I wasn't aware was even in pate)
Whatever the hell my uncle can't eat (a list) and forgot to remind me until they arrived fro the states 3 days in advance
No refined sugar for a diabetic i.e. fruit for dessert

We'd picked the menu, ensuring GF was available as it was a relative so we knew in advance. One option for carnivores, another for veggies, plus kids meals. Then the invitations asked about dietary reqs and I fed back to venue with a detailed table plan.

whatever it is that makes pate pate (i think it was rennet, which I wasn't aware was even in pate)
You don't put rennet in pate. What makes pate pate is mashing everything up together into a spreadable and fairly fatty paste.

Just make the veggie option GF/vegan.

A few people have said this: I totally get the logic of having a shared veggie/vegan option, but unless you know you have a guest that is veggie and GF I don't see why you'd combine those too: if you're doing meat, potatoes and veg for the meat eaters then that's very easily GF, whereas trying to pick something that is vegan AND GF is going to massively restrict your options.

Definitely agree with that Margaret plus it really sucks as a meat eater to be lumped with the veggie option because I have coeliac disease, especially as it tends to be easier to make the meat option GF than the veggie option.

Honestly, I wouldn't ask about dietary requirements. I think adult guests are capable of managing their dietary requirements without third party help. I call that getting over involved tbh.

Adults and hotels manage this kind of detail all the time without any supervision!

I've checked with hotel and they are happy to do children's portions of adult meals as well as offering the "children's option". We have a couple of under 10s who might well prefer that