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Restaurantgoers, put down your forks. The age of esteem has arrived.

As of Thursday, trammel 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 such those persnickety provender scientists say.

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

Or so one would ween.

In reality, the new nutrition-labeling rule, passed together much controversy by the King County Board of Health in 2007 and amended after much haggling thereafter, doesn’t appear to subsist 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 evanescent blindness, maybe caused by growling stomachs.

“I didn’t see the sign,” reported Bruce Flemins, of Seattle, enjoying a plateful of Ivar’s fish and chips.

“Uh … I didn’t cognizance,” said Kevin Sakuda, of Queen Anne, after stepping up to a Baja Fresh contrariwise in Fremont, where he ordered a burrito as he stood alongside a new 2-foot-high nutrition subscribe.

Other patrons noticed the calorie information, but it didn’privately faze them.

“We eat what we want,” said Damon Mayfield, of Colorado Springs, Colo., as he sat with a form into groups of friends lunching at Ivar’s. Learning that, say, an fit condition of hint after ‘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 excursion 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 each last morsel.

“It’s impossible to eat the amount thing anyway,” he later confessed.

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

“People don’cheek by jowl care,” he said. At worst, they get mixed up and think the calorie counts are in fact the prices.

Also on Jan. 1, a mastership banning plastic-foam containers, such as Styrofoam, took effect. As of Thursday, more 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 superintendent for Public Health — Seattle & King County. Initially, the Washington Restaurant Association fought the rule vigorously, calling it “simply not workable.” The sum of two units 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 lance a public-education campaign about menu labeling and execute follow-up studies to see whether the new determine has an effect on dining habits, Apa said.

At Baja Fresh, though, customers seemed to have being ordering the like as they always had, reported Adriana Hurtado, general manager of the Fremont location.

Across the street, at Cold Stone Creamery, however, employee Leah McKee stood below the newly installed signs with nutritional information, waiting for customers. Her disembowel said the point to be solved wasn’t the newly posted calorie data.

“Everybody has their New Year’session resolutions,” she sighed.

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