I’m not the sort of person who likes to take leftovers home from a restaurant. I don’t like carrying things or having to keep track of things, and I’m almost always hungry enough to eat the entire portion that I’m served. My girlfriend, on the other hand, takes leftovers home as a matter of course. She seems to have a smaller appetite than mine in general, and she’s definitely more thrifty about food. When she was in college she spent a year in France, and she says the employees at restaurants and cafés always had a hard time with her constant requests to take things home, although they would grudgingly let her.
I’ve been to Europe twice and I ate out a lot both times, but given my dislike of taking things home and tendency to clean my plate, exacerbated by the smaller portions, I never noticed that people didn’t take food home or that the option wasn’t offered. This post by Chris Bertram, who is British, implies that this is a general European thing, apparently linked to the smaller portions, so I suppose it must have been the case in the countries I visited (Spain and Hungary).
It’s funny the little differences that you never notice because you’re not looking out for them, isn’t it?
