How Portion Sizes Translate Across Europe

I spent a long weekend in Amsterdam last month, mostly eating. This is not a confession, it’s a research methodology.

The thing that kept catching my eye was the menu board. Every burger place in the Netherlands seems to list the patty weight in grams, right there next to the price. 150g. 180g. 200g. It’s matter-of-fact, like listing the ABV on a beer. Nobody thinks this is strange. You can compare two burgers across two menus and know which one is bigger without asking.

This does not happen in most other places. In Germany the weight is usually only on the menu if it’s a nice restaurant trying to justify a price. In the UK it’s almost never there. In France, forget it — the patty is described by adjectives: galette de bœuf, steak haché, occasionally façon bouchère — and you’re supposed to trust that the kitchen has chosen a sensible size.

Here’s what I’ve gathered from about two years of paying attention:

The Dutch default is somewhere between 150g and 180g for what they’d call a standard burger. Anything under that gets flagged as a “kids” burger or a slider. Anything over 200g they call a “big” or sometimes a “double”.

The German default is around 180g for a burger at a proper burger joint, 150g at a pub that also does sausages and schnitzel. The fast food chains sit below that: Burger King’s double Whopper patty is about 113g each, and McDonald’s Big Mac uses two 45g patties. The premium chains — Peter Pane, Hans im Glück — will tell you exactly because telling you is the whole point.

The French default is lower than you’d guess. A “normal” restaurant burger in Paris is often 125g or 140g. This used to surprise me until I realized that a classic steak haché at home is 100g — the burger is just the pub version of what a French kitchen was already making. They don’t feel the need to push it up to American sizes.

The British default is 6 ounces, which is 170g, which is almost exactly halfway between the French and American defaults. Make of that what you will.

The Americans use ounces and pounds and you have to do the math in your head. A quarter-pound is 113g. A third-pound is 151g. A half-pound is 227g, which is a number so big that if you ordered it in Europe they’d ask if you were sure.

The practical takeaway, if there is one: if you travel and you want consistency, the safest bet is to pick a place that lists the weight on the menu. If they don’t list it, you’re at the mercy of whatever the local norm is, which might be anywhere from 125g (France) to 227g (the American chain who haven’t localized their menu yet).

And if you see “Royale” or “Big” or “XL” anywhere in the name, you’ve left the land of numbers entirely and you’re in brand territory. Good luck.