New calorie information on restaurant menus causes barely a hiccup

Restaurantgoers, put down your forks. The day of reckoning has arrived.

As of Thursday, chain restaurants in King County were required to post nutritional information on their menus.

Ivar's bread bowl of white chowder: 1,360 calories.

Baja Fresh quesadilla: up to 1,430 calories.

Cold Stone Creamery milkshake in "Gotta Have It" size: anywhere from 1,000 to a teeth-chattering 2,040 calories.

Talk about a buzz-kill. One measly paper cup and you have a full day's worth of calories — or so those persnickety food scientists say.

While King County restaurantgoers used to be able to slurp or scarf or smack their lips in a state of blissful ignorance, those days are officially over.

Or so one would think.

In reality, the new nutrition-labeling rule, passed amid much controversy by the King County Board of Health in 2007 and amended after much haggling thereafter, doesn't appear to be as big of a deal as opponents feared.

In a food-focused tour of Seattle on Thursday, we saw patrons paying so little notice to the new rule that we initially wondered whether we had discovered a new sort of temporary blindness, perhaps caused by growling stomachs.

"I didn't see the sign," said Bruce Flemins, of Seattle, enjoying a plateful of Ivar's fish and chips.

"Uh ... I didn't notice," said Kevin Sakuda, of Queen Anne, after stepping up to a Baja Fresh counter in Fremont, where he ordered a burrito as he stood alongside a new 2-foot-high nutrition sign.

Other patrons noticed the calorie information, but it didn't faze them.

"We eat what we want," said Damon Mayfield, of Colorado Springs, Colo., as he sat with a group of friends lunching at Ivar's. Learning that, say, an order of fish 'n' chips contained 606 calories had "not the slightest effect" on his choice, he said.

Jonathan Andersen, a Los Angeles resident visiting his father who lives in Puyallup, made a lunchtime trip to Ivar's and saw that the bread bowl he craved could be problematic, caloriewise. He ordered it anyway, but he overcame his guilt by vowing not to eat every last morsel.

"It's impossible to eat the whole thing anyway," he later confessed.

Ivar's posted its nutrition information about three weeks ago, crew member James Fisher said, but nothing much has changed.

"People don't care," he said. At worst, they get mixed up and think the calorie counts are really the prices.

Also on Jan. 1, a rule banning plastic-foam containers, such as Styrofoam, took effect. As of Thursday, some takeout restaurants had switched to other types of containers and others hadn't. Restaurants using foam containers could face fines.

The nutrition rule is aimed at consumer awareness, said James Apa, communications manager for Public Health — Seattle & King County. Initially, the Washington Restaurant Association fought the regulation vigorously, calling it "simply not workable." The two sides came up with a compromise that affects only larger chains.

Officials continue to hope nutritional information will help consumers address obesity. Public Health — Seattle & King County plans to launch a public-education campaign about menu labeling and do follow-up studies to see whether the new rule has an effect on dining habits, Apa said.

At Baja Fresh, though, customers seemed to be ordering the same as they always had, said Adriana Hurtado, general manager of the Fremont location.

Across the street, at Cold Stone Creamery, however, employee Leah McKee stood beneath the newly installed signs with nutritional information, waiting for customers. Her gut said the problem wasn't the newly posted calorie data.

"Everybody has their New Year's resolutions," she sighed.

Maureen O'Hagan: 206-464-2562 or mohagan@seattletimes.com