Jason Stocks doubled the size of District Table when he moved to Port Salerno in 2018, after six years in Stuart.
Jason Stocks has a hankering for barbecue.
What else would you expect from a chef whose forearm is tattooed with a pig outlined in butcher’s cuts? Whose personal favorite is the belly? Who says he could eat it "all day long" on steamed buns with kimchi.
Stocks, who opened District Table in 2013, wants to open a barbecue joint next — something more casual than his Port Salerno restaurant — whenever he finds the “right, funky piece of real estate,” preferably somewhere between Jensen Beach and Hobe Sound.
Barbecue — being as Southern as it gets — would be a natural extension for Stocks, whose District Table menu promises Southern hospitality and features Southern foods (butterbeans, sweet corn, collard greens, black-eyed peas) and Southern preparations (smoking, pickling, canning, preserving, jamming).
Yet Stocks eschews the “Southern” label, which can bring to mind salty meats, overcooked vegetables and heavy desserts.
District Table’s “New American menu with Southern roots” means something different to Stocks, a Palm City native who has family in Tennessee and Kentucky, who summered in North Carolina and who began his career in Georgia and West Virginia.
Though Stocks aims to get most of his ingredients from farms as close to the restaurant as possible, he dislikes the industry buzzwords.
Server Sarah Ford prepares to serve up two boards of smoked cobia dip at the start of the dinner rush at District Table & Bar in Port Salerno. The board consists of smoked cobia dip, pickles, fermented hot sauce, crackers, preserved lemon and herbs.
Certainly, District Table — in search of the best — procures some specialties from elsewhere, such as California asparagus (it won't grow in Florida) and Georgia tomatoes (when they're not in season here). The key is to be honest about it, he said.
"I love porcini mushrooms and truffles, but you can’t get those in Florida,” he said. “Again, it’s just about being transparent with your customers."
Stocks said he makes almost everything in-house, reeling off a list that includes pastas, sauces, canned tomatoes and aioli for his popular Belle Glade street corn. But when it comes to certain high-volume needs, he makes exceptions.
One of them, Southerners will cheer not jeer: Stocks uses Duke's Real Mayonnaise.
Bucking one of today’s hottest new restaurant trends, Stocks doesn’t clutter his menu with a laundry list of food sources.
Stocks has such a close relationship with Diane Cordeau, owner of Kai Kai Farm in Indiantown, her name sometimes appears on the menu alongside the vegetables she grows, often specifically for Stocks.
What little Stocks doesn't buy, he grows in herb and vegetable beds adjacent to the restaurant, built and tended by Nick Taylor of Local OrganicKs in Indiantown.
Less common ingredients put a special flair on Stocks' food: trout roe on deviled eggs, black truffles on meatballs, bee pollen on his Georgia peach salad.
While Stocks resignedly won’t serve foie gras anymore — he gets too many complaints — he encourages diners to try offal (internal organs), such as beef tongue or sweetbreads (typically the thymus or pancreas of a calf or lamb).
The Georgia peach salad consisting of chevre, arugula, honey vinaigrette, pecans, pink peppercorn pomegranate molasses, pickled blackberry and bee pollen at District Table & Bar in Port Salerno.
Travels to wife Mirka’s Slovakian homeland are evident in District Table’s menu. Don’t be surprised to find halushki (fried cabbage/onion/egg noodles) or kolacky (jam/fruit-filled sweet buns) or steamed dumplings on the menu — but with Stocks’ spin on them.
A little German influence comes from a couple of trips Stocks took with his grandfather to his homeland: “What I took most from there was the processing of dried, cured meats and sausage-making,” he said.
Though Stocks didn’t realize his vocation until after college, the seeds were planted early. As a child, he played hotel and restaurant with his brother and sister, and remembers baking and making salads at an early age.
Stocks doesn’t remember autographing the cover of his first kids’ cookbook — as if he was a celebrity chef — but his mother later gave it to him as a Christmas present, along with professional cookbooks, some signed by Emeril Lagasse on a Vero Beach visit.
Now Stocks is planting seeds — literally — in the next generation.
He and Mirka launched the Giving Garden at Palm City Elementary School last year when their son, Lukas, was in second grade there. They and a host of other volunteers teach students how to grow, harvest and prepare their own food.
“The kids love it, whether they pull out one radish or 100,” Stocks said, adding any surplus food is donated to House of Hope, a Martin County nonprofit for the needy.
Stocks also taught knife mastery to Lukas, now 9 — who got a baby brother, Alex, on Sept. 11.