A good café on the corner

Dupont Market
1807 18th St NW
Washington DC 20009
202-797-0222

On Saturday mornings I would get up late and then work until I felt hungry, which normally did not take long. It was a choice between finishing up early on Fridays and working Saturday mornings, or the other way and I almost never went the other way. I liked my evening coffee on Fridays and then a nice cold beer to close the week and start the night. But this sometimes meant that I worked on Saturdays while people were enjoying the day.

One of my favourite places to go when I got hungry and it was nice out was Dupont Market – down the street from where I lived. It was the best place in the neighbourhood for sandwiches and to be sure I went there in the cold weather too; but when it was warm you could sit on the patio and read the paper or watch the people walk up and down 18th St. The owners set a dish of water outside for any dogs passing by, and there were always people walking in and out of the tiny shop. Across the street was a gas station and right beside the deli were two other eating places, so it was easy to miss except if you were looking out for it. But once you knew it was there it became hard not to stop by when walking past, and the sandwiches inspired deep loyalty in those who lived or worked nearby, including myself.

There was a narrow deli counter tucked into the back of the small shop space, next to the table with the coffee flasks, behind which three people could barely fit. They had a griddle and a bread toaster; and between those and a fully stocked deli they created wonders. There is something about watching your food being made for you that makes you hungrier. It makes the waiting even worse than it already is. But it turns the eventual eating into pure joy.

I liked the El Umberto sandwich very much – turkey, Swiss cheese, avocado and alfalfa sprouts on toasted ciabatta. If you didn’t ask them not to, they would drizzle the filling with olive oil and crack fresh black pepper onto it, which made me happy. I think the olive oil at the end really transformed the sandwich. Of course, I am also a fool for sprouts. E-- hated sprouts and thought eating them was like eating grass, and she used to tease me mercilessly for adding sprouts to everything.

She liked to have the chicken salad sandwich, which I was also a fan of because they used dark meat most of the time, and because it had grapes in it. It was creamy and peppery and tasted of borscht. They also sold the chicken salad by itself in little takeaway cases, hidden in the fridge along with a surprisingly fine cheese selection. Like everything else in the shop – it was a little overpriced.

But what we both loved there and got more often than anything else was the breakfast burrito – a filling of burger patty cubes, cheese, pickled jalapenos, tomatoes, eggs and avocado in a wheat tortilla wrap. You could not keep it for long after it was made because the moisture from the eggs would seep out and make the tortilla wrap soggy, so we often sat outside with our burritos and a coffee and ate them while deaf to the sounds each of us was making. I racked my brains to figure out why it tasted so much better than any other breakfast burrito I had ever eaten, but to this day I have no satisfactory explanation. I have seen them make it – so I know that there aren’t any secret ingredients, and the ones that they use did not look particularly extraordinary. Yet somehow when they were all put together, some kind of magic happened. Maybe it was the griddle that they cooked it on.

There are places you go to because they are destinations, and places that you go to simply because they are there. Dupont Market is a little bit of both. There were times when I thought to bring someone there or otherwise I craved a sandwich and made a special trip there; but other times I would walk by on the way back from tennis and duck in for an Orangina and a piece of bread. It seemed to be open all the time and I always felt at home there. Perhaps it was because I knew that after leaving the place it was simply a left, two blocks and a right to my house – not a far way to travel before laying my head to rest.