Portion sizes in the US are ridiculous... often 2-3x larger than here in Europe.

When I regularly visited New York for work, and we'd get takeaway sandwiches, I'd have to open them and remove half the filling. I just couldn't physically eat that volume of meat, cheese or especially mayonnaise. For all drinks, I'd order small.

Where in Europe? I haven't toured the _whole_ continent but I've been to restaurants in Germany, the UK, and Ireland and did not find their portions to be any different than what you'd get at the average corner restaurant in the US.

Now, there are plenty of food vendors and restaurants in the US where big portions are considered part of the experience. Especially hamburgers, subs, and other sandwiches. I once ate at a place that served a plate-sized burrito completely covered in french fries. 12 inches wide and 6 inches tall. SOME people can eat that amount of food but most people cannot, and nobody is expected to.

Finally, large portions in NY street food are often customary because for lots of people with demanding jobs and 12-16 hour shifts, lunch is often their only meal. Or, half of it is lunch, the other half is dinner later on.

New York deli sandwiches are certainly not representative of what you get everywhere in the US. They are famously large.

And expensive to match the size! A pastrami sandwich at Katz's is ~$30. A croque madame at a similar place in Paris is ~€15.

People generally split a Pastrami sandwich over a couple meals or with someone else.

They may be famously large, but I don't think they are abnormally large for most of the US nowadays? I certainly didn't think they were particularly big when I visited.

Katz serves roughly 3/4 lbs of meat. That is particularly big. You can get triple hamburgers which would be similar is size - but most people are ordering singles or doubles. And you can find other kinds of large sandwiches around the country ... but it is not the most common of sizes.

I think what made them not seem excessively large to me, is that it didn't really come with much else? Yes, it was more meat than I would get on a sandwich, typically. But... that is about it?

Maybe I got too used to some of the obscure burrito places around Atlanta that would put way too much on them?

Probably depends on where you go.

I don't know about "the US", but as a "European" I thought serving sizes were comparable to what I get in restaurants at home. Drinks were an exception, since basically all restaurants had unlimited soda for next to nothing. This was actually great, since I was riding a motorbike in the desert in July.

For reference, I live in France and visited LA and random towns in the western states.

It absolutely varies a lot within Europe too, but my feeling at least is that the difference between European and US portion sizes gets bigger as you move towards low-end places. High-end restaurants are pretty similar in portion sizes almost everywhere I've been, presumably because they're not competing on portion sizes, while lower-end places are much more susceptible to local expectations of what is good value.

I'm a big fan of European serving sizes compared to U.S. for food – but when it comes to beverages, particularly water, I can't believe how much they charge you for how little they give. I understand everything comes in bottles with VAT but even asking for tap water I found they'd only bring a very small glass.

In some European countries water is free. I am from Sweden where all places have free tap water and fancy places often have free sparkling water.

Along the mediterranian seemed like the only place to get free water were the ancient fountains that spittle out a stream. But then you’d have to wait for the inevitable old man to finish washing his head and arm pits in that fountain. Beer was usually substantially cheaper than the water offerings.

In Spain by law all eating establishments have to provide tap water for free if asked.

I'll be visiting France soon, so will be able to compare on that front. But I think it is an understatement to say that things are universally smaller.

And on the drinks, even places in Japan that had free refills still gave, at largest, an 8oz cup. Usually, I think they were even smaller. Even getting popcorn at Universal, the bags were large, but nothing compared to what I'd expect over here.

Some of this, I'm sure, is having gotten used to ordering the larges. For a time, it was not unheard of to get a 32oz soda at any given convenience store. May still be normal? I don't know.

(And, of course, this isn't getting in to the sizes of vehicles.)

I don’t see why it would be bad to get more water to drink

There's actually something of a stereotype that Japanese places will give you unreasonably small portions of water with meals. (Dogen plays off this in some of his videos.)

But then, I think it's only been Americans I heard this from, so.

Ha! I hadn't heard of this before, so it caught me completely off guard.

The coffee was the one that really surprised me. Order a coffee and get a 6-8oz cup. With nothing on the menu to indicate you can get a 12-16oz. Was surprising. (Not bad, mind. Just surprising.)

In both my trips to Japan (one recent, one 20yrs ago), I never noticed this, and I think I drink a lot of water in general, and especially as a tourist because I'm doing much more walking.

The free water cup in a lot of places in the US is like a 6oz slosh now.

I didn't mean to imply it was. My point was that everything is smaller.

>I'm not even sure you can get a US large in Japan for most drinks?

I've seen what large US drinks look like, and you definitely can't get that here in New Zealand. Like a litre of soft drink at a fast food place, it's absurd.