In our recent trip to Hongkong, I realized that we have been ordering food that is always an excess. For our first lunch in a Chinese restaurant, we ordered fried noodles and chicken wings with rice - that's for me and my husband, respectively. But when the food arrived, it was good for 3 or 4 persons. In other words, there was a lot of leftover. For our dinner, we went to another restaurant and ordered just one rice meal - beef this time plus 2 sets of chopsticks. And we were right because the food that was good for 1 person had filled us up. On the next days, we always ordered 1 meal only and we never went wrong. Think of the money saved instead of ordering 2 meals for us. However, this trick is only good if you are not a heavy eater like us.
It can be a good way to save money but there are some restaurants that don't allow their customers to share meals. Before ordering you need to know what the restaurant's "sharing policy" is. Because should you order food believing you will be sharing it only to learn that it isn't allowed, you'll be forced to spend more money than you planned to.
We are a family that doesn't like cooking at home all that much so whenever we go to restaurants we always order a lot and just bring home whatever is left. The downside I guess is that it's much more difficult to convert these items into a new dish since it's not as flexible as making your own at home so you're pretty much left with the quality of the leftovers to remain as is. Although I guess it's not too terrible since as long as it's not an expensive restaurant you're still just paying only a little bit extra of what you would had you cooked those dishes at home when you factor in everything that's involved including shopping and travel as well as gas and oil and dishwashing soap.
If there's too much food I'll usually ask to take the rest home with us, seeing as we paid for that food, rather than leaving it there. Then we can get additional meals for that money as we'd still eat the rest of it later. I've done the same on vacations before too. When we went to France we used to get given at least 3 croissants AND 2 pain au chocolat EACH for breakfast, as well as whatever we actually ordered. We used to take those with us, along with the butter and jam portions they put on the plates, so that we wouldn't need to order anything for our lunch. It meant that we were eating everything we'd paid for and didn't need to buy more.
