Is this portion too small (pic)??? Should I complain?

[TeachyTeacher]

OK, a little 1st world problem-ish but we're really trying to budget and eat out rarely, as a treat. Went out over the weekend and ordered this pasta dish from a well known chain restaurant, costs around £15. Is it just me who thinks it's a kiddy portion? I took it up with the waitress who said it's the portion size and thats that... should I email a complaint?

No picture?

So tiny I can't even see it
Yanbu!

@TeachyTeacher

OK, a little 1st world problem-ish but we're really trying to budget and eat out rarely, as a treat. Went out over the weekend and ordered this pasta dish from a well known chain restaurant, costs around £15. Is it just me who thinks it's a kiddy portion? I took it up with the waitress who said it's the portion size and thats that... should I email a complaint?

🙈 it won't let me attach pic! Sorry

No idea. No pictures.

Will have to imagine just how small it is...but I did complain once at the portion of pasta I received. I think it was something like £15 for a very average tomato pasta dish. They offered me some garlic bread for free

£15 is a lot for pasta... what recipe was it.. did it have meat/seafood?
and was is it Zizzi... cos I went to one on Sunday and it was all shit food!

For £15 I would want a massive plateful.

You'll have to draw us a diagram with measurements.

Whatever the portion size, there'll be hundreds of MN teeny tinies claiming they couldn't possibly eat it all and the leftovers would do them for seven more meals.

But it would have still cost £15 whatever the portion size so I'm not sure that's the issue TBH.

If you don't want to spend a lot, pasta from a chain restaurant probably isn't a good use of money really. You're effectively paying restaurant prices for the equivalent of a £2.50 supermarket ready meal, plus drinks will be really expensive too.

If I'm paying restaurant prices, it needs to be significantly better than supermarket ready meals or anything I can easily make at home, which discounts just about all chain restaurant food and a lot of easy quick foods like steak, sandwiches, wraps etc.

Independent Asian places often offer the best value because it's harder to replicate the cooking techniques and the range of ingredients used, where you need a spoon of lots of different sauces makes it expensive to do at home.

Plus you're likely to get a main for less than £15, especially at lunchtime.

So sorry guys!!! It just won't bloody post the pic!!! anyway it was honestly about a small cereal bowls worth of pasta and one piece of chicken! It was a chicken pesto dish! Does anyone else think the restaurants will start to shrink portions but not prices given the energy hike, their bills must be soaring too it's a terrible vicious circle (where my belly lost out!!!)

Lol @Comedycook!
My mil bought me a spaghetti measurer once for Xmas , never used it
Was it.a meat pasta or veggie?

Lots of places now require you to order sides separately, although that would have bumped you up in this case to £20 for your main, which is very expensive for a chain depending on what was in the pasta or pasta sauce?

Surely they’ll say you should have said something at the time though or even the next day.

I think you have left it too late.

I would put a photo on trip advisor though and give an honest review about how small it was for the money.

If the picture won’t attach, could you upload to somewhere like Imgur and share a link?

Its getting expensive to eat out BTW, as a family of 4 we always spend something like £120 with just one alcoholic drink each for two of us.

A pic would help, however, 2 things to consider over the past couple of weeks:

1. All restaurants have to have a calorie amount stated for each dish on the menu. This means that each dish will probably be more stringently weighed / checked than before. So essentially for your dish they may have been trying to get below a certain calorie amount and therefore one of the ways to do is restrict the portion size

1. Cost of goods is just mental and therefore passing cost onto the customer

They’re not going to save money by reducing the amount of pasta on the plate. Pasta costs pennies

I wonder if portions have got smaller to stop the calorie counts on the menus appearing excessive.

Based on recent experience I’d expect a restaurant pasta dish to be twice the size of a ready meal.

Were you full when you finished it?

A 'recommended' portion of pasta is about 60-70g, which doesn't actually look like a lot on the plate if that's what they go by.

I'm always disappointed by pasta portions in restaurants tbh.

I'm also wondering whether its to do with the calorie content. You need surprisingly little pasta for a lot of calories. The actual calorific cost of a huge serving might put people off. Though they are probably cutting every cost they ca,n things like pasta are the cheap ingredient. People just won't go again if its not meeting their expectations

Could you upload the photo to a pic sharing app then just paste the link to the photo here?

apps.apple.com/us/app/flickr/id328407587

Yes, pesto pasta is always going to look quite high calorie unless the portion size is tiny. See also burger and chips, pizza, pies, roast dinners where there's a lot of roast potatoes, stuffing, gravy and Yorkshire puddings involved. A lot of these meals will be well over 1000 calories based on some portion sizes served, before you think about starters, sides and drinks.

It also illustrates my previous comment about some foods not being worth paying restaurant prices for. Pesto pasta is probably one of the quickest, lowest effort meals you could make, and you could probably do a large portion for 4 people for less than £15 with a couple of ready sliced chicken breasts, a good ready made pesto, maybe some sun dried tomatoes and a splash of cream all stirred into cooked pasta.