Restaurants 2: Portions 「レストラン２：量」

My father and I went to a Chinese restaurant the other day.  It was my first time at a sit-down restaurant in quite some time.  We took our seats, ordered our food, and then the meal came.

I stared at the plate in front of me.

"I only ordered a single portion," I said automatically.

"That's what I gave you," came the response from the waiter.

I couldn't believe my eyes.  The plate was heaped with food.  The pile of meat and vegetables was nearly invisible beneath the mountain of rice, which was topped off by several precariously-balanced pieces of crab rangoon.  It could easily have passed as a plate for three at a Japanese restaurant.  Did seven dollars really go so far?

Now, I am capable of eating quite a lot, and so I finished my plate, but I did not have of an appetite for the rest of that evening (or the following morning, for that matter).  I have heard a lot about the monstrous appetizers at some restaurants that give you 2,000 Calories before the main course even comes.  Reading about something and seeing it for yourself, however, are two different things.  I wonder if restaurants will let me order a single meal and split it with three people from now on?

I should add, by the way, that even the biggest meals in Japanese restaurants rarely top 1,000 Calories.  Where do Japanese restaurants fall down, then? Sodium.  Most menus in Japan now list Calories, fat, and sodium for each of their offerings.  I was horrified on more than one occasion to open up a menu and see offerings that were made with 4.5 grams of salt for a single serving.  It just goes to show you: you have to be careful of what you eat, no matter where you live.

Oh, and no, my insistent capitalization of the word "Calorie" is not an error: it's the teacher in me.  One Calorie, with a capital "C", equals 1,000 calories, with a lower-case "c".  If you were to live on a 2,000-calorie diet, you'd die of starvation rather quickly, because the energy in our food, as labeled in the nutrition information, is counted in Calories, not calories.
Japan avoids this confusion altogether by listing the energy in its foods in terms of "kcal", or kilocalories, which is a much less confusing way to count Calories; don't you agree?