Menu calorie tallies harder to find

Diners at California Pizza Kitchen last week found some enticing new offerings, such as white chocolate and strawberry cheesecake, Baja tacos with sauteed mahi-mahi, and a Moroccan-spiced chicken breast salad.

Gone from the menu are the calorie counts the restaurant has listed for each item since July 1.

The Los Angeles-based pizza and pasta chain dropped that data when it printed new menus last week, in part because customers didn’t like them much.

“You have to look at the restaurant business as entertainment. Why make the customer feel guilty?” said Larry Flax, co-chief executive at CPK.

“People kept getting mad” because they didn’t understand that a California state law mandates that chain restaurants provide this type of information to customers, Flax said.

The restaurant chain wanted to gather up all the nutritional facts — carbohydrates, fat, etc. — and put them in one place for patrons who ask for the information.

The change highlights the different ways California’s chain restaurants are dealing with new and still-evolving rules that dictate how they provide patrons with nutritional information about the food being served.

IHOP and Applebee’s Neighborhood Grill & Bar are among the chains posting calorie information on menus. Some Jack in the Box restaurants have the information framed on a wall near the counter. Others are offering the data in brochures.

Non-chain restaurants are exempt from the rules but may provide the information voluntarily.

When people sit down at a California Pizza Kitchen, they are now handed the data-free menu and a menu-like folder that contains detailed nutritional information about the food served by the chain. The chain posts the same nutrition facts online so that patrons in states that don’t have menu-labeling laws can have access to the information.

Not listing calories on menus is legal for now.

California menu-labeling laws were enacted last year but are being phased in. For now, restaurant chains with 20 or more units can choose to print calorie counts next to items on their menus or to provide more detailed nutritional information — such as calories, saturated fat, carbohydrates and sodium — on brochures made readily available to patrons.

Starting in 2011, chain restaurants will be required to print calorie information on menus. So, eventually, California Pizza Kitchen will have to go back to the menu style it just dropped.

“This legislation will help Californians make more informed, healthier choices by making calorie information easily accessible at thousands of restaurants throughout our state,” Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said when he signed the law last year.

It’s no surprise that some California restaurants are opting to provide nutritional information in separate brochures instead of on menus, said Cathy Nonas, director of the New York City Health Department’s physical-activity and nutrition program.

When a similar law went into effect in New York last year, some chains quickly put calorie information on their menus while others didn’t. “They had a difficult time,” and some of the early adopters went back to menus that lacked the information, Nonas said.

“Let’s say they had a signature dish that had a lot of calories. They felt they would be at a competitive disadvantage,” she said.

It was only after the city started to fine restaurants for not posting the information that all the chains started to comply. At that point, the push-back from both restaurants and customers subsided. Nonas said she suspects the same will happen in California a year from January, when the law requires chains to post calories on menus.

Whether such labeling laws will lead patrons to make more healthful choices is not clear, restaurants say.

California Pizza Kitchen saw a “small shift in behavior” from high-calorie to lower-calorie items, said Rick Rosenfield, the chain’s other chief executive.

IHOP prints calorie counts on its menus, so it’s hard to miss that an order of chocolate chip pancakes contains 610 calories.

But that information does not seem to make much difference in what people order, said Patrick Lenow, the chain’s spokesman. “We have not seen a significant shift in order patterns …. probably because the menu already included a number of “healthful choices, and items that are more indulgent,” he said.

About a dozen states and local agencies have adopted various forms of menu-labeling laws, according to the National Restaurant Association.

Rules similar to what California will have in 2011 are in several of the health overhaul bills circulating in Congress and have the support of both the restaurant trade group and consumer organizations. The federal rules would standardize the way chain restaurants report the information nationwide.

The results of studies on the effect of menu labeling are mixed, mainly because the research is just beginning, said Kelly D. Brownell, public health director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity.

One study found that the number of calories per customer order decreased at nine of 13 fast food or coffee chains once New York menu-labeling laws went into effect. Another that looked only at consumers in low-income and minority neighborhoods in the city found that the change had little effect on purchases.

“I suspect that the science is going to be mixed in the beginning but that we will figure out” how to provide nutritional information that affects public health, Brownell said.

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