BEIJING - A Peking duck dinner might inspire a pang of guilt about indulging in some decadent, fatty fowl. But health-minded diners at the high-end Da Dong restaurant chain here in the Chinese capital can at least tell themselves they did a little weightlifting before their meal.

That's because the menus at Da Dong are heftier than a small gym dumbbell - 5 pounds, 4 ounces, to be exact. The 140-page menu measures 20 inches tall, 15 inches wide and more than an inch thick. It outweighs National Geographic's Global Atlas.

Packed with rich color photos, the volume is divided into chapters. A table of contents listing about 200 dishes runs four pages. And diners are handed two other menus: a selection of seasonal items running 24 pages and a relatively thin wine list of 19 pages.

Da Dong's massive menu may be among the most eye-popping in town, but it's hardly alone in its heftiness or artistic design. In the United States, a trend toward in-season and locally grown food has helped shrink menus at many restaurants. In China, however, high-end eateries have been supersizing.

Menus By The Pound

Middle-8th in Beijing, specializing in dishes from Yunnan province, offers a 128-page, 3-pound menu. At Pure Lotus, a pricey vegetarian hideaway, customers wrestle with a golden-paged volume stretching 2 1/2 feet wide and weighing 4 pounds, 5 ounces; and if that isn't enough, the nine-course $133 tasting menu is carved into an inch-thick wooden plank, also 2 1/2 feet wide.

Countless run-of-the-mill restaurants offer customers menus as large and colorful as American high school yearbooks.

China's taste for masterpiece - style menus is even spilling over to Western eateries here. Mr and Mrs Bund, a French restaurant in Shanghai, has embraced big menus wholeheartedly. The top-rated eatery gives diners a 120-page menu offering 150 items, with photos of almost every dish.

"We were inspired by these Chinese menus," said Paul Pairet, the restaurant owner. "Western menus, they try to avoid repetition, and the price range is very narrow, but we wanted to open it up."

Extensive Chinese menus are hardly new; just ask anyone who's ordered from a Chinatown takeout joint in the United States. Harley Spiller, who holds the Guinness World Record for the largest collection of Chinese takeout menus at more than 10,000 and counting, says his longest comes from Grand Sichuan in New York City. But in general, stateside Chinese menus are slimmer than their mainland Chinese counterparts.

The 3 C's Of Big Menus

Just why Chinese menus are growing in size is a complicated question rooted in cooking, culture and commerce.

Chinese cooking is very varied, and also very flexible. Chefs can produce a multitude of dishes out of the same basic ingredients just by switching from boiling to frying or using a slightly different sauce. In addition, low labor costs in comparison with the West make it easier to have more cooks in the kitchen.

Family-style ordering, where everyone shares dishes, feeds a desire for a wide selection. In addition, cooks are eager to appeal to the different tastes of diners from China's various regions, ranging from the spicy-loving Sichuanese to the more delicate-dining Shanghainese. Also, a culture of entertaining pushes restaurants to expand their offerings. Typically, dinner party hosts show their generosity by ordering lavishly.

Other less obvious factors over the last 20 years have also helped make menus in China increasingly elaborate. Restaurant-owner Jen Lin-Liu says the supersizing trend is a reflection of China's past poverty, mixed with its recent economic gains.

"Chinese are able to try all kinds of imported ingredients that weren't available just a little over a decade ago," she said.

"The Dragon And Tiger Fight" Dish

Dong Zhenxiang, the chef behind the 600-seat Da Dong, says he started adding photos to his menu in the early 1990s. He found that foreigners as well as Chinese appreciated the visual guide.

"Chinese dishes sometimes are very abstract when it comes to their names. Even Chinese people, if they don't know the story behind it, they'll find it hard to understand," he said.

"Take, for example, The Dragon and Tiger Fight. It's fish and chicken. But if you don't know that, you don't know what's in it. A picture will show you," he explained. "Even I, as a professional chef, it's taken me years to realize why some dishes have their names."

As his menu grew more elaborate, Dong found himself in a predicament: Customers were pinching them at a pace that made running his restaurants difficult.

"Ordinary customers and competitors would steal them; they would put them in their bags or under their coats. Waitresses would ask if they had taken them, and they'd just say 'no,' and we couldn't just search them," Dong recalled. "We need about 200 menus for each restaurant, and we'd get down to 100 and there wouldn't be enough to allow people to order."

Some restaurant-owners might have dealt with the situation by switching to cheaper, simpler printouts. But Dong was inclined to go big and elaborate.

Now, his mega-menus are made once a year at a top printing house in Shenzhen, and theft is way down - their sheer size makes them difficult to steal. Still, Dong said, "we did have one person come in with a suitcase and manage to get one that way."

If diners really want to take home a menu, Dong said, they can purchase last season's for $200. ]]>