Every sandwich is an act of trust, which means every sandwich carries with it the possibility for total failure. To make a sandwich, you've got to layer together at least three separate ingredients into a coherent whole. It's trickier than it sounds; not many places specialize in the making of meats and vegetables and cheeses and bread, so at least one ingredient has to be outsourced, leaving a vital aspect of the finished product in the hands of someone else. If you had a sense of every invoice and business relationship and product experiment that went into the creation of a sandwich, you'd probably throw an extra buck or two in the tip cup every time you ordered one out of sheer respect.
Georgetown's Hitchcock Deli (6003 12th Ave S, 582-2796, hitchcockdeli.com) is a huge, clean white concrete box—a storefront this size on Capitol Hill would probably cost you a Ferrari every month—minimally decorated with handsome wood and an anachronistic pay phone on one wall. When you walk in, your eyes are drawn directly to what matters most: the deli case, which displays beautiful meats, cured and smoked in-house. Behind the counter and in the back of the shop, employees slice, massage, and prepare them. People care less about their own children than the staff of Hitchcock Deli seems to care about these meats…
