Treading a fine line between "cool" and "wanker".

But that's the frustrating thing: I'm 6'2", fairly active and not a small eater at all by the standards of anyone in the UK/Europe, and neither was the other person I was sharing that meal with, who at the time was cycling 100 miles a week for his commute and who'd recently had to buy a bigger box to be able to fit the size of pasta-heavy lunch he needed in it. Both of us own plates that are too big to go in most dishwashers, and when eating out for functional purposes in the UK, we'd normally consider the person who'd picked the dish that came with the most food to have won, in some sense. But in many places we ate in the US (where we were staying in hotels and didn't have much alternative) the problem was always being served too much. We found it difficult to find anywhere (that wasn't a fast-food chain selling plastic and cardboard) to just go and eat functionally rather than have an enormous blow-out meal with lots of wasted leftovers, basically, and people who eat on the scale we do shouldn't have to look for tricks involving the kids' menu to achieve that.