The City Council has a beef with soon-to-be implemented nutritional requirements for thousands of restaurants.

The chairman of the council’s Health Committee, Joel Rivera, is introducing legislation on Wednesday to water down a rule recently approved by the Board of Health mandating that eateries post calorie counts and nutritional information on menu boards or near cash registers.

“People going to Burger King are not the kind of people who care about the calorie count,” a senior adviser to Mr. Rivera, Michael Nieves, said yesterday in a telephone interview.

Mr. Nieves said patrons who do care about eating low-calorie foods naturally opt for lower-calorie items on menus, such as salads. Like other opponents of the measure, he said complying with the menu board requirement would be too onerous and expensive for businesses, particularly because of the endless combinations of ingredients.

Mr. Rivera — who last year proposed using zoning laws to limit the number of fast food restaurants in neighborhoods with high obesity rates — is instead proposing legislation that would require nutritional and calorie information be made available in a pamphlet, on a poster, at a kiosk, or in some other written form. It would also have the Department of Health create a nutritional database that restaurants could tap into. A draft copy of the legislation did not provide details on how that idea would work.

The bill, which the Mr. Rivera’s office said would override the Bloomberg’s administration’s menu rule, does not a provision that was being considered several weeks ago — to give restaurants that complied with the menu board a tax credit.

That was dropped after it was determined that the council did not have legal authority to implement such a system. According to Mr. Rivera’s staff, he will instead introduce a resolution along with his bill Wednesday calling on the state to do so.

The new menu rule applies to restaurants that have standards portions and have been making available the caloric information of their menu items. If they stop making such information available prior to March 1, the rule would not apply.

“It’s a little perverse to go after the restaurants that are trying to be the good guys,” a lobbyist for the National Restaurant Association, Richard Lipsky, said.

“Starbucks has 84,000 different drink combinations,” Mr. Lipsky said. “There is no way you can physically post all of the calorie counts. The cost and the benefit together make it not worth doing.”

The city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas Frieden, said he believes that calorie information should be in a more visible place than on, for example, food wrappers.

A spokesman for the health department, Geoffrey Cowley, said the department has not seen Mr. Rivera’s legislation, but “from what we’ve heard about it, we would certainly oppose it” because it would dilute the menu rule.

“We think the Board of Health has the authority it needs to regulate menu posting,” he said. “All we’re asking is that the people who make caloric information available do so in a way that is most useful.”

The menu rule piggybacks on the city’s ban of trans fats from menus at thousands of restaurants. That ban, the first of its kind in a major American city, made national headlines when it was passed by the city Board of Health.

The ban drew praise from the public health community and rebuke from those who viewed it as Mayor Bloomberg stepping over the line by dictating onerous regulations. It has prompted several national chains, such as the fried chicken empire KFC, Wendy’s, and Taco Bell to announce plans to eliminate trans fats from their food.

The lesser-discussed portion of the bill on menu postings will apply to about one in 10 restaurants, city officials say. It exempts establishments that do not have standardized menus.

Dr. Frieden, the architect of the city’s smoking ban, has adopted the strategy as a way to reduce skyrocketing obesity and diabetes rates.