District Pour House + Kitchen needs to overcome a couple of gaffes

Don’t order the chicken cassoulet at the new District Pour House + Kitchen. Don’t ask for the ravioli, either. Or the chicken and dumplings.

I tried ordering the cassoulet three times at the month-old restaurant — it’s on the printed menu, after all — and only on my third visit did a server tell me why the kitchen was going to turn me down again.

“It’s coming off the menu,” he whispered. “So are the ravioli and the chicken and dumplings. We haven’t been serving them for over a week.”

The servers at the District know how to keep a secret. Nobody working my table during any of my three visits to this clean, comfortable new venue said anything about the MIA dishes until after I’d attempted to sample them. It made for an awkward game, wondering aloud what might be available rather than simply placing an order for food.

Jason Roarke, co-owner of the District, told me later that he and business partner Dan McCall are learning, as they go, which dishes their customers actually want (and which items have issues). They found that no one was ordering the cassoulet. Meanwhile, the kitchen was still trying to crack the recipe for a gnocchi satisfying enough for the chicken and dumplings.

“We’re still tinkering with that one,” Roarke said. “And we just want to make a seasonal change to the ravioli.”

Roarke and McCall likely have other changes ahead of them as District Pour House + Kitchen makes its go in the location most recently vacated by the Gaf. The owners’ concept is loaded with potential; they just need to iron out a few annoying kinks. When the food here is good, it’s very good.

And when it isn’t so good?

On my first visit, I was with someone who had already made up her mind to like the District. She was especially bewitched by one thing she had tasted here the previous week: a dish the menu describes as “creamy lump crab dip.” What came to the table this time, though, was runny and tasteless, an overpriced bisque in a bad disguise.

“The dip I tasted was nothing like this,” my friend insisted. “It didn’t even look the same.”

Now, the dip-not-a-dip was one of the few outright bombs I tried at the District. Most of the dishes I sampled, if not memorable, were at least tasty enough to enjoy in the moment.

The moments can feel long here, though. On each of my visits, the service lacked not only the finesse and intuition vital to good restaurant hospitality but also the basic attentiveness. It was frustrating enough, in fact, that I finally asked Roarke: “Did anyone train these waiters and waitresses?”

His answer was, of course, yes. The staff sat for a week of training, he said. But what kind of professional server, I wanted to know, delivers a bowl of macaroni and cheese — a big bowl that’s somehow on the appetizer list rather than among the entrées, but don’t get me started — with two small plates for sharing but no serving spoon? “I’ll be right back with one,” this particular server said when I requested one. She returned with a teaspoon.

Hearing this tale, Roarke gave me a wan smile and said, “We do have serving spoons.”

That “baked mac + cheese,” as the menu announces it, was delicious that day: penne blanketed in a thick sauce made with gouda, white cheddar, monterey jack and parmesan. It’s not easy to share, even with a real serving spoon, but it’s good enough that you don’t want to let anyone else have some.

The first time I tried ordering the polenta fries, I heard, “The polenta hasn’t set yet.” That was reasonable enough, I guess. The fries — big, clunky, golden — were available on my second visit, but they arrived lukewarm, with a soupy red-pepper-and-tomato sauce that would have benefited from the taste of roasted red peppers.

The entrées that are both on the menu and at hand are good. I rarely order meatloaf in restaurants anymore (it’s almost always too dry or else bland), but the District serves a miniature loaf that’s moist, flavorful and covered with an amber sheath of caramelized onions. The pork “ribeye” here is stuffed with a fine sage-and-apple dressing and a pan jus that complements the meat just right. And I found another satisfying autumn dish in a mound of creamy butternut-squash risotto topped with slices of roasted duck, delicately glazed with tart cranberries.

Maybe in homage to a former tenant of this location, the Romanelli Grill, which counted deep-fried catfish as its signature, the District’s menu offers a fried, cornmeal-crusted catfish fillet. And a whole fried catfish shows up more and more often as a dinner special.

“Do you debone the whole catfish when you serve it?” I asked one waitress, recalling the veteran Romanelli servers, who were so expert in the art of removing those spindly bones that the act was a riveting little performance.

“Debone the fish?” she echoed, looking at me as if I were no longer speaking English. “No,” she said. “The customers do that.”

This might come as a disappointment to the old Romanelli crowd I’ve seen inside District Pour House + Kitchen. I’ve noticed some Gaf regulars here, too. Which figures — the place was designed to attract a cross-section of Waldo-ites, older folks in the early evening, and more youthful (but maybe less hungry) patrons as the night progresses. The owners plan to introduce a late-night menu (from 10 p.m. to midnight, anyway) later this year.

The Romanelli Grill and the Gaf, whether you loved them or hated them, had distinctive personalities. The District (the name, according to McCall, signifies that the restaurant “really isn’t in Waldo or Brookside but in a district of its own”) has yet to develop its own identity. But it has already defined its own turf, so a personality — one not defined by the place’s early hiccups — seems sure to follow.