Long-time Houstonians may remember Chez Eddy, the “healthful” fine dining restaurant that opened in 1981 in Methodist Hospital’s Institute for Preventive Medicine. It served an ambitious menu of European, Cajun and Southwestern dishes, and a typical three-course meal ran just 500 to 800 calories. It even inspired a cookbook, The Chez Eddy Living Heart Cookbook by Dr. Antonio Gotto, Jr.

Alas, Chez Eddy is long gone. But recently Trevisio Restaurant, located on the sixth floor of 6550 Bertner (you’ll recognize the six-floor waterfall-cum-parking garage as the right building) has paired up with Dr. Tim Garson to revamp the menu so that it now designates the caloric value of each menu item. This new “red-yellow-green” menu uses traffic light labeling to categorize each dish in terms of the number of calories it has. Green, for example, includes plates of 350 or fewer calories, yellow is between 350 and 450 calories, and red is anything above 450. We were invited to try this new health-conscious menu, and you will be glad to know it’s not just salads.

For starters, we tried the pomodoro (tomato) soup ($8, yellow) and polpo (octopus) carpaccio ($9, green, photo above). Executive chef Jon Buchanan notes that to stay within the designated traffic-light ranges, the kitchen has had to monitor every step in the cooking process. Instead of dousing pots and pans with olive oil, they measure every tablespoon because just a single tablespoon has 120 calories. Small changes can really make a difference in the caloric value of a dish.

We also sampled the spinach pizza ($8, photo above) – yes, pizza – and it falls in the yellow category. It is made with four ounces of dough and one ounce of cheese, whereas your typical pizza is three times this amount. This modest serving of dough topped with spinach, roasted garlic, oyster mushrooms, tomatoes, red sauce and fresh mozzarella certainly fooled our taste buds. Next up was the pan-seared red snapper ($16) served on a bed of lentils with pancetta. It also falls in the yellow category. Buchanan uses roasted tomatoes, grilled lemon and salsa verde to kick up the flavor and still stay within the caloric limits.

Just when we thought our healthy points were all used up, a tray of four desserts was brought out, each one ($4, photo above) in the green category of 350 calories or less. Nutella cheesecake, tiramisu, panna cotta and lemon tart are each served in one-ounce shot glasses, allowing for a calorie-conscious sugar fix.

When it comes down to it, burning more calories than you consume is how the pounds come off. Trevisio’s new menu makes it easy to know how many calories we’re eating, and in a flavorful way.

Trevisio, 6550 Bertner in the Texas Medical Center, sixth floor, 713-749-0400, trevisiorestaurant.com