> it’s not like you could place an order for e.g. “five breaded shrimp, three grams of braised pork, two wontons’ worth of wonton soup, ...” from a Chinese restaurant. You could only order each of these in larger amounts, because there are fixed costs to making a dish.

This seems to work at dim sum places, maybe because most dim sum seem to be portioned into, and then steamed, in small bamboo baskets.