How to calculate macros at any restaurant

Restaurants don't measure portions to the gram, kitchens cook with more oil and butter than you'd guess, and a single menu line hides three or four sub-ingredients (the dressing, the sauce, the glaze) that move the numbers more than the headline protein does.

The good news: you don't need perfect numbers. For body recomposition, blood sugar, or sodium goals, "close enough, consistently" beats "exact, sometimes." The steps below get you within roughly 10–15% — which is usually all you need.

Find the protein on the plate (chicken, salmon, steak, tofu, shrimp) and estimate the portion in palm-sized units. One palm of cooked protein is about 110g, which works out to roughly:

• Chicken breast — ~35g protein, ~3g fat, 0g carbs
• Salmon — ~28g protein, ~13g fat, 0g carbs
• Steak (sirloin) — ~30g protein, ~10g fat, 0g carbs
• Shrimp — ~22g protein, ~1g fat, ~1g carbs
• Firm tofu — ~16g protein, ~9g fat, ~3g carbs

Restaurants usually serve 1.5–2 palms of protein for entrées, and about 1 palm for salads and bowls. Multiply accordingly.

Rice, pasta, potatoes, bread, tortilla, fries — one fist of cooked starch is roughly 45g of carbs and 2g of protein. A typical restaurant side is 1.5–2 fists. A burrito or pasta bowl can easily hit 3 fists.

Quick reference for the most common ones:

• White or brown rice — ~45g carbs per fist
• Pasta — ~45g carbs per fist (sauce adds more)
• French fries (medium) — ~60g carbs, ~20g fat
• Flour tortilla (burrito-size) — ~50g carbs, ~7g fat
• Bread roll — ~25g carbs, ~2g fat

This is where home estimates fall apart. Restaurant cooks use butter, oil, and cream to make food taste like restaurant food. Add a baseline of 15–25g of fat to almost any entrée beyond what the ingredients suggest — more for Italian, Mexican, Indian, and Southern food, less for Japanese and Vietnamese.

Specific tells: anything described as "crispy", "creamy", "buttery", "glazed", or "smashed" is signaling extra fat. A tablespoon of olive oil is 14g fat (120 kcal), and a typical restaurant sauté uses 2–3.

Dressings and sauces are the single biggest source of estimation error. A ladle of caesar dressing on a "healthy salad" can add 30g of fat and 500mg of sodium that nobody plans for.

• Caesar, ranch, blue cheese — ~15g fat per 2 tbsp
• Vinaigrette — ~10g fat per 2 tbsp
• Aioli / mayo-based sauces — ~20g fat per 2 tbsp
• Soy / teriyaki — minimal fat, 500–900mg sodium per 2 tbsp
• Cream sauces (alfredo, vodka) — ~15g fat + ~10g carbs per ladle

The fastest win when you're estimating: ask for the dressing on the side and use half. That single change typically cuts 100–200 kcal from a salad or bowl.

Sum protein, carbs, and fat across the three components (protein + starch + sauce/extras). Convert to calories with 4-4-9: 4 kcal per gram of protein and carbs, 9 kcal per gram of fat.

Then add a 10–15% restaurant tax on calories and fat to account for the cooking oil you didn't see. If the dish description includes any of the fat tells from Step 3, push it to 20%.

This process works, but it has real limits:

• Cuisines you don't cook at home (Ethiopian, Burmese, Sichuan) — you don't have a baseline to anchor on.
• Menus that hide ingredients ("market vegetables", "chef's sauce") — you're guessing about a guess.
• Multi-course meals — error compounds across dishes.
• Strict medical targets (diabetes, kidney disease) — 10–15% off is too much.

At that point, doing it in your head is the wrong tool. It's slower than just opening MenuFit and lets the social part of the meal go cold while you do math.

MenuFit pulls the live menu for the restaurant you pick, estimates the macros for every dish, and shows a 0–10 fit score against the goals you set — diabetes, high protein, low sodium, allergens, anything. It also suggests the small swaps and kitchen requests (dressing on the side, no added salt, brown rice instead of white) that move a borderline dish into your range.

You get the answer in seconds instead of doing palm-math at the table, and you can ask the server with one clear line.