Incorporate Favorite Restaurants and Cocktails

Build the menu out of places you already love. List the three to five restaurants that mean something to you as a couple, identify the dish you order at each, and take that list to your caterer. Most will recreate or reinterpret a dish they can taste or read a recipe for, and a reinterpretation usually travels better through a commercial kitchen than a literal copy does. Do the same with drinks: a cocktail from your first date or the bar you kept returning to gives the bar list a reason to exist beyond gin and something sparkling. Then add a line on the menu card explaining each one, because without it the personal choices read as arbitrary.