Chinese desserts

Any theories on why Chinese restaurants don't offer a dessert menu? At least I never remember seeing one or being asked, room for dessert?

Probably because Western-style desserts aren't part of a traditional Chinese meal.
 
In China, I've been served soup as a final course.  Fresh fruit is also sometimes offered.
 
Fortune cookies are an American invention.  Some Chinese restaurants in the US serve deep-fried fruit fritters for dessert, and various types of ice cream are common (even though dairy products are rarely if ever used in traditional Chinese cookery.) Some old-fashioned "Chinese-American" restaurants serve almond cookies.  
 
Chinese sweets and pastries, such as the "mooncakes" that are consumed during the 8th Moon Festival (which falls in early October this year), are usually served in the afternoon, with tea -- sort of like the way the French and the Italians traditionally eat pastries.  http://chinesefood.about.com/od/mooncake/a/moonfestival.htm  These mooncakes are interesting, and worth trying at least once, but they certainly aren't like typical Western desserts.  They can be filled with salted hard-cooked egg yolks, red bean paste, or lotus seeds, among other things.
 

I've never been to China, just Chinatown in NYC, the chinese desserts I'm familiar with are very delicious glutinous rice cakes, some plain, with chocolate, with sesame,  with sweet bean. All sorts of preserved plum, sugar spun candies with chocolate, candies made with milk. On a take-out menu in NY I've seen almond cookies, lychee nuts,.  On a menu in house restaurant, I've seen lychee nuts in syrup and fried banana.  Most of the time as rumaki said, its fresh fruit or even a soup in China, although they do have all sorts of "candies" for the kids over there too.

There was a Chinese restaurant in Universal City in CA that I think was called Fum Lums or something like that.

They had a great dessert menu.  There was some sort of a lemon custard that was starchy and delicious.

They also did caramelized fruit at your table.  Hot butter and sugar cooked until it caramelized.. then sliced fresh apples or bananas were tossed in and sprinkled with sesame seeds.  It was then dropped into ice water so you wouldn't burn yourself on the hot caramel.

In the 60s all of the Chinese restaurants in LA would serve complimentary pineapple chunks in creme de menthe and candied kumquats besides their almond and fortune cookies.

Now you're lucky if you get a complimentary sliced orange.

I have always found dessert sections at the end of Chinese menu. Never got anything for free.

The selection though is not always to my taste..its seems more Americanized, unless you go to an upscale place.

What i do enjoy are the desserts at Vietnamese and Thai places. They are bit on the different side, but quite good if you like to experiment, and I do.

One of my fav. Chinease restaurants here offers great little fried donuts. They are warm, crunchy on the outside and moist on the inside and rolled in sugar. Delicious!

Most of the buffets have an assortment of cookies, cakes, jellos, fried donuts and ice cream, but I find that after filling up on the buffet items I just cant eat any dessert.

I almost never order desserts out as I find that most of the restaurants give such large portions that I just don't have the room for desserts.