And now comes yet another solution to the issue of food in Irish pubs: new-American bistro food. This transcends both the problem of Irish food and the overcompensating solutions. It’s like post-Irish food — as if this were just an Irish-owned bar, or an open-window café on nice nights, with sails of various colors on the ceilings, some walls in chartreuse, and so many TVs tuned to sports that you always know the score.

Food begins with a bean purée that ought to have more garlic than it does, and not be so sweet. That said, it’s pretty good on the crusty white bread in the basket, and better than good on the crumbly, sweet-as-cornbread whole-grain slices.

Fried calamari ($8) comes out well here. The breading is a light sprinkle of cornmeal, for extra crunch. The dip is a simple jalapeño sauce, and the squid rings are accompanied by cherry peppers of moderate heat. Maine crab cakes ($8) are small but meaty and come to the table hot, with a salad of field greens. You’ll have to decide what to do about the chipotle mayonnaise, however, as it’s spicy enough to overpower most bites of crab cake.

Arugula salad ($8) is a good job, with corn and cubes of crunchy jicama, and a slice of avocado, all in a cilantro vinaigrette. The bruschetta ($7) is something of a travesty — soft bread where it’s supposed to be a toasted crust — but it does have decent tomatoes, real fresh basil, and a very passable goat cheese.

Duck Two Ways ($18), though small, is my pick of the entrées. The confit leg of duck tends to beat the sliced fresh breast in cherry sauce, unless you have the breast medium-rare or rare — the chef salts it, and it ends up too much like the cured leg if done medium or more. The vegetables with this are a triangle of grilled polenta and small-caliber asparagus, grilled on one visit, sautéed more recently.

Seared salmon fillet with green salad and mixed vegetables ($16) is good, not great, fish, but again you get the asparagus, and things like a butterhead salad, radicchio, early-summer corn (nah), and grilled potatoes (yes). Jambalaya ($16) is a low-percentage play in a bar-bistro, but unless you try it, you can’t know whether Orleans is meant to evoke New Orleans. Apparently it’s not, as the jambalaya has too much red pepper and little flavor from its quota of two chicken legs, scallops or shrimp, and chicken breast meat. No andouille sausage or okra on two tries. One time the rice was hard and the dish soupy; more recently it was properly cooked — just dull, once you factored out the red pepper. Boston-bar jambalaya is rarely more than hotted-up Spanish rice with assorted protein added at the end. Memo to chefs: if you can’t go down to New Orleans to taste, at least reread those Paul Prudhomme cookbooks, and note all the other spices and the broth-pilaf idea.

Orleans has lots of mixed drinks, with less emphasis on beer and ale. But the wine list is not bad at all, and many are available by the glass. My favorite was the 2001 Cellar No. 8 Zinfandel ($9/glass; $34/bottle), which has a port-like anise intensity shared by only a few of the old Napa zins. You also wouldn’t go too badly wrong with the 2002 Salmon Creek Merlot ($7/$26), which finishes a little sweet but has some fruit. On the white side, the 2001 Trimbach Reserve Pinot Gris ($11) will eventually give you an idea of what a really dry pinot grigio made by French people would taste like. The 2001 Wynns Coonawarra Estate Riesling ($8/$32) is remarkably similar despite the unrelated grape variety. One problem is that both whites were served way too cold in smallish glasses. Iced tea ($2) is actually brewed, and cappuccino ($3.50) and decaf ($2) are good enough.

The desserts are all $6, but rather nondescript. The chocolate-marble torte is like fudge in a pie crust, with some white chocolate for marbling and berries for garnish. Nothing wrong there, nor in the excellent berries and peaches served on meringue boats with a good mango sorbet. Peach cobbler wants a better crust, but chocolate-lava cake wants only a good appetite for hot cake batter, which is what all these underbaked chocolate desserts taste like.

The atmosphere at Orleans is jumping. There’s always a crowd in Davis Square that seems to want the combination of familiar treats and somewhat-better-than-familiar food that Orleans serves up. There are a lot of different seating options — restaurant tables, high café tables, couches and low tables — and food seems to get to all of them. A DJ makes some space for dancing later in the evening Thursday through Sunday. The crowd is apparently not deterred by service that is pleasant enough but full of little errors: clearing the silver without replacing it after appetizers, a long pause before desserts, confusion about the wines or what’s available, a general attitude of being programmed and rushed rather than loose and spontaneous. Everything else about Orleans is perfectly Davis Square, so the service should be too after a few years in the location of the former Aquarium restaurant.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com.