Dinner for two. No stress.

Yes, and being honest about it produces a better evening than pretending otherwise. You say your level and the menu is built for it — there's a format here that involves almost no cooking at all and still feels like an occasion, because a cleared table, lower lighting and a proper dessert do more than an extra course ever does. What you won't be given is something you've never made before.

Over-ambition, and it shows up as absence. Every course you add takes you out of the room, so a three-course dinner cooked by one person means roughly two hours alone at the stove while the other person waits — which is the opposite of the point. In the format comparison the full three courses scores worst despite having the best food, for exactly that reason.

Worth actually deciding rather than defaulting, because everything downstream changes. Cooking together turns the cooking into the date and comes out top of the comparison — but it needs a different kind of recipe: parallel jobs, forgiving timing, and no step where one person stands watching the other. If that's the plan, you'll get a menu built for it rather than a solo one with an extra pair of hands.

You list them before any menu is suggested and they're respected without negotiation. If it's an allergy rather than a preference, you'll also be reminded that every label needs checking yourself — nothing here can confirm a specific product is safe, and a special dinner is a bad time to find that out.

There's a plan for that, and the general rule is worth having now: if something is running late, serve the courses further apart rather than trying to catch up. Nobody minds a slow evening and everybody notices a panicked one. The timeline is also built with more slack than a recipe assumes, because most people cook slower than recipes pretend.