There's a lot happening in this Hen House

Customers check out the many choices on the menu at Hen House Wings and Waffles. (PAT GREENHOUSE/GLOBE STAFF)

An early taste of what's new on the restaurant scene

It's called the Hen House Wings and Waffles. It's nestled in the industrial No Man's Land known as Newmarket Square. And it serves soul food. Hallelujah.

Boston is a city that should have more places to get a thing of greens - collard, kale, mustard, all three, whatever. Right now, you can count that number on about two chickens' claws. The greens at the Hen House aren't bad, they're smoky, spicy, and just overcooked enough to be soft but not so much that you can't make out what they are. In any case, as a matter of civic action, the people should be out supporting their local soul food shacks.

Of course, the Hen House is neither a shack nor a house. You could fit in its wide dining room and vast kitchen one Coast Café (Cambridgeport) and most of Poppa B's (Blue Hill Avenue). Most soul food places won't let you see how the magic happens. At the Hen House, you can see one of the cooks pour oil over a tray of chicken pieces. (Where will those go?) The lacquered tables are raised and configured so that you wind up having to love your neighbor by sharing space. Finger licking becomes a community affair. The Hen House is a giant cafeteria and thinks like one. The menu is vast. Fried chicken is just the beginning. There are 10 sandwiches (a rare roast beef with horseradish mayo is excellent; so is a turkey BLT), 12 pizzas, and 15 sides (red beans and rice being the best), and three desserts.

This is an attempt to be all things to all people. If you work nearby and just want black-forest ham and Swiss for lunch, drop in. If you want a dozen "say cheese" pizzas, by all means, say "cheese." But the owners of the Hen House didn't call their restaurant the Pizza 'N' Sandwich Shop. They're leaning on the soul-food cachet of chicken and waffles. And the strain shows in the food. How much soul it has is open to interpretation.

The chicken is too politely fried, and the too-fluffy waffles beneath them are unappetizingly absorptive (syrup seems redundant). The candied yams are not candied enough. And the cheese in the macaroni and cheese is conspicuous by its relative absence. It's true that too much of any of this stuff will kill you. But too little when you need more kills, too.

This town needs the Hen House, but the Hen House needs help. Not because you can see the cook preparing your meals, but because on three visits in a space of about six days, the place seemed undermanaged. Right now, that big, sparsely used dining area may be doubling as a waiting area for takeout to arrive (speaking temporally, this is not fast food), but somebody has been using the tables to eat. On every visit, they were covered with debris. One afternoon, a customer, tired of sitting with her purse in her lap, got up to tell an employee about her dirty table. It was wiped off. For every diner like her, there was one who did the cleaning himself.

Despite the seemingly unlimited seating and obligatory flat-screen TVs (permanently locked on ESPN News), dining on the premises doesn't seem like what this place was meant to do. Fetching the food yourself is not a big deal. Eating it out of disposable boxes and plastic containers is. Humoring the waste-averse with a recycling bin would be some kind of comfort. Eating untold pieces of fried chicken, several waffles, pints of macaroni and cheese, greens, and red beans and rice, waffle fries as crispy as the actual waffles should be, and half of a limp meat-lovers pizza is guilt enough. Hauling all the food's Styrofoam and soft plastic into the restaurant's trash constitutes an indignity. On one visit someone official came over to check in on the service. He was friendly. He had complimentary treats. And things ran pretty smoothly. He didn't seem to be around on subsequent visits, and the place was a hot mess. Among other things, his hen house needs a tougher fox.

The Hen House Wings and Waffles, 1033 Massachusetts Ave., 617-442-9464