Mikey and Mel’s Famous Deli, Downtown, Washington, DC

Washington has a new deli! It’s Mikey and Mel’s, and it sits downtown at 1828 L Street, NW, just a couple of blocks from the Farragut North Metro stop.

And it’s the most deli-ish deli in the Washington area. Just look at the pickle bar.

It’s larger than the bars at Parkway and Attman’s put together. I went recently, but let’s start off with a great Senior Correspondent scouting report —

Senior Deli Correspondent Les Wexler here.  I had lunch last week at the new Mikey & Mel’s downtown.  Joining me was my old friend Jeff.  Now, we’re both old New York Jews with decades of Jewish deli experience between us, so the bar was set pretty high.  We both started with their Matzoh Ball soup.  It had a nice, big fluffy ball, and a tasty chicken broth that wasn’t too salty.  

I ordered my favorite sandwich, Tongue with a shmear of Chopped Liver, and was in gastronomic heaven.  A little squirt of deli mustard and it was perfect. 

Jeff had pastrami on rye.  Out of deference and respect for OG John Tanner and his quest for the perfect pastrami, I didn’t try it and figured I’d leave that for his visit.  But it looked appropriately fatty (and one thing my mother taught me years ago is never order lean pastrami, because it has no taste.)  Jeff enjoyed it. The sandwiches came with a small side.  I had a very good potato salad, and Jeff had cole slaw.

Mikey and Mel’s has a Pickle Bar.  Kosher dills; Half-sours; Pickle Chips; Horseradish Dill chips.  I could have spent hours there alone.  Good, crunchy, tasty pickles.

My one regret was that I was too full for dessert, as there was a display case full of traditional deli pastries – rugelach; Hamentashen; cookies, etc.

Here’s the set-up. Our Mikey and Mel’s — there’s an older one in Fulton, Maryland, in Southern Howard County — opened only recently, so they’re still in the shake-down phase. It’s a bright, inviting new space with both booths and tables, two-tops that can be combined, as we shall see, to seat larger groups. It’s modern. All of the ordering is electronic, just as in Grazie Grazie and, as I fear, the future. You can order online, or at one of, I think, four computer terminals in the restaurant, but you can’t walk up to the counter and order corned beef on rye. Alas. The menu is huge with 89 breakfast items and about 150 lunch items. I lost count. There are, for example, 28 different “overstuffed” sandwiches and 20 “specialty” sandwiches, and each of those sandwiches has many choices — the choice of bread, toast or not, choice of cheese. It’s a great system for those who can zip through the terminal in no time flat, which is good because the place magically becomes jam packed by the last stroke of the noon bell.

Enter the Washington Wise Men’s Philosophical Discussion Group well before noon, and imagine the wrench of Damocles hanging over the machinery. When our first member arrived, the prescient host, Brianna, a very cheerful and charming person, set aside six seats for us and volunteers to take out order for us. We drifted in, which took some time, enough for me to go through a bowl of pickles, and more time to review paper versions of the menu and have another bowl of pickles, and more time still (and more pickles) to go through the ordering process. Here’s what we ordered. Marc and I split two sandwiches. First, Marc ordered a small (eight-ounce) tongue sandwich.

For the unfamiliar with tongue, here’s a close up.

Tongue is prized in many cultures and cuisines — you’ve seen lengua in some of my reviews — and this was a good version, and a good sandwich. The meat had that dependably rich, beefy tongue flavor set on good rye bread with Mikey and Mel’s deli mustard. Marc and I agreed that it was a hit, as was my hot pastrami sandwich — a 12-ounce version, as it turned out.

Doesn’t it look delicious? It was. The sandwich had just the right amount of fat, enough, but not too much, and the deli mustard (which I spread around more) set off the richness beautifully. The rye bread was a fine vehicle, not up to Manifest Bread standards, but good, and there’s no better platform for pastrami than rye. Mikey and Mel’s edges out Deli City for the best cold-smoked pastrami sandwich in DC, and it’s up there with Corned Beef King. It went beautifully with a Dr. Brown’s root beer.

Ken ordered a breakfast sandwich, pastrami egg and cheese on a sesame bagel.

That’s a nice looking bagel, and Ken said that the sandwich was good, except that it was overbalanced with bread. That’s the besetting sin of bagel sandwiches. A breakfast sandwich needs Cuban bread, an English muffin, or best, a biscuit, ideally, a cat head biscuit,

to achieve the proper balance. Still, as Ken said it was a good sandwich, and I know of no place on earth that offers pastrami in a cat head biscuit.

The other three Wise Men ordered eggs and corned beef hash, two with toast, one with a bagel, and all with eggs over easy.

I chose that order, Melchior’s, out of kindness and a consideration for your sensibilities. it was the only one with the eggs over easy. The two other orders were hard-cooked, a major transgression. The photo also hides the corned beef hash pretty well.

They made a hash of the hash. Corned beef hash is one of my favorite dishes, a mixture of potatoes, corned beef and onions, all cut to similarly diminutive proportions, well mixed, and finished on a hot flat top to create a marvelous crust. Here, the potato chunks were outsized and the corned beef sliced cold-cut thin, and then plopped atop the potatoes rather than mixed. There are some bell peppers there, which are okay, but a dearth of onions. I wrote about a similar wrongheaded approach at the Parkway Deli here. To their credit, Mikey and Mel’s corned beef was high quality, unlike Parkway’s (on that occasion). And there were far more potatoes than corned beef — a huge portion, actually, a portion for a day of physical labor or a nap in the office.

There were other issues. The tongue arrived cold, rather than heated as requested. It was very god, so that was a venial sin, but still. And I’m not at all sure I didn’t order an eight-ounce pastrami sandwich, but I can’t say that wasn’t a blessing rather than a sin. Ken’s sandwich order got lost along the line, and arrived very late, after profuse apologies and the offer of a free cookie, which Ken declined. Bob spoke with the manager in his gentle style, and she expressed her own concerns about the need to get things in better order.

I hope that they do, and indeed I trust that they will. They run the Fulton location well enough to finance a prime spot in downtown DC. And Mikey and Mel’s does so many core dishes — matzoh ball soup, pastrami, tongue, corned beef, chopped liver — very well, and the crowds of customers attest to quality. You really should give Mikey and Mel’s a shot, using these tips. Familiarize yourself with the menu and decide what you want. Go early or late, at 11:45 or earlier, or after, say, 1:15. Otherwise, for dine in consider placing your order from your nearby office or a handy coffee shop right before you go. And order to their strengths, which are considerable, and try some other things, maybe some Hamentashen, and let me know how you like them. Try it. You’ll like it.

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