Time On His Side - Al's Steak House - Del Ray

The idea is as old as Western intellectualism itself.  It’s not a culinary truth, exactly, but something far, far more elemental and kindred to us all.  From Heraclitus’s pre-Socratic slice of epistemological bummer pie of determinism, to Edward I’s very non-shag-o-delic 13^th century concept of just deserts [sic], to that more recent, and no-less-famous supposition posited by Mick and Keith in their 1969 masterpiece, Let It Bleed, the message is always the same:  you can’t always get what you want, but you just might find you get what you need.

Al’s Steak House.  It wasn’t what I wanted (or thought I wanted), but it was exactly what I needed.

How we crossed paths, this old sandwich joint and I, can only be chalked up to the issuance of some decree by a far-flung cosmological court adjudicating justice from somewhere out there, behind the sun, and ordering confinement and correction for my own universal crime of suddenly becoming (without my fully being aware of it) what modernity has made of so many Washington-area men:  the all-American douchebag.  Here I was, on this very recent and particularly glorious, golden autumnal midday, frantically rushing around—from bank to Costco to post office—like some lunatic whose hair had been set on fire, when really I should have been riverside along the Potomac, sunbathing in a folding chair, book in hand, with Prokofiev on my playlist, and a hint of bourbon on my breath.  But no.  Not here.  Not in Washington.  A pause to look inward is deeply discouraged in this place.  And repose is something the city’s killing pace will abide.  Nor, this day, would I fucking chillax.  I moved from errand to errand like a man unhinged.  I ran stop signs getting to the dry cleaners.  I sighed loudly and rolled my eyes when made to wait too long in line at the bank.  By midday, however, the morning’s coffee and straight feed of pure, unadulterated adrenaline had started to eat away at me; they were hollowing me out.  I needed food.  And fast.  So I hit the gas and careened into the nearest food-dense neighborhood, which, as luck would have it, was the hamlet of Del Ray, that self-consciously charming pocket of Alexandria that the hipsters will (for now) allow you to believe time has forgotten.  But the hipsters have overlooked something; the march of time has left us Al’s Steak House as some non-ironic relic of a bygone era meant to chide modernity for its silly culinary ways, and to teach self-absorbed motherfuckers like me that life is not a race, that whatever mission I’m on is hardly of lasting consequence to the greater good, and maybe, just maybe I’m not all that important; maybe my “industry connections” are meaningless; maybe, just maybe I’ll have to wait (and wait) for my fucking sandwich just like everyone else.

Opened in 1955 by its namesake and proprietor, Al’s Steak House was sold, in 1965, to a former-employee and then-neighborhood local boy named John Severson.  John is also the very man who took my lunch order last week.  He looked up at me from his place behind the cash register, amid the busy, busy lunch rush, the sizzle and heat of flat-top grill jamming out the food, and asked me, serenely and Buddha-like, not what I wanted, but how I was.  How was I?   Was this a joke?  In truth, I was starving, foul-tempered, and in one monster of a fucking hurry.  But I didn’t say that.  Instead, I used the word fine, and asked Mr. Severson how he was.  Nicely.  Mr. Severson paused.  He considered.  The man was twenty-dupes deep into a lunch rush and he was thinking.  He thought some more.  A little tired, he told me, and his feet hurt.  More thought followed by a furtive smile.  Then the only question I’d been waiting for:  what did I want to eat?  Despite the name, Al’s Steak House is not the dimly lit, red-velvet parlor where cows give up their body parts to diners tucked neatly behind heavy menus in deep leather booths.  Rather, Al’s is a sandwich shop that nods to Philadelphia with its walk-up counter and four Carter-era tables for seating.  Trophies adorn a south wall above a picture of Arnold Palmer.  On the north wall hang framed 8 X 10s of celebrity patrons.  Glen Campbell is there.  As is Bill Clinton, Oprah, and Branford Marsalis.  I told Mr. Severson I wanted a medium mushroom steak sandwich.  And I tried to imply with clipped tones and a willingness to pre-pay that I was in hurry, like big time.  But no.  Mr. Severson waved my debit card away and suggested I have a look around at the celebrity photos as my sandwich was being made.  Have a look around?  Nearly each and every inch of the roughly two hundred square feet of “dining” space was choked with tables, chairs, trash cans, and people—lots of people—either eating or waiting to eat.  The act of standing in one spot without repeated bodily contact with another patron was nothing short of impossible.  We bumped into each other.  We stepped on one another’s toes.  So I stood still as I could and waited.  And waited.  Arms at my side.  Eyes on the photograph of Arnold Palmer.  The strange woman in front of me talking to herself.  I grew increasingly impatient.  All of the food coming off the grill seemed destined for call-ahead and take-out patrons only.  They breezed in, breezed out with boxes of food, not a care in the world.  But not us.  We fools and knaves who had actually ordered in person, at the counter, never seemed to get our food; our order was never up.  Minutes went by, one after the other after the other, but the line never moved.  So I started to get angry.  Not just impatient; I was becoming indignant.  I was convinced I had discovered the one real and true embodiment of everything that was wrong with the world.  I had—I thought—chanced across the one, last food purveyor in the area who had failed to get the fucking memo that I (the singular pronoun is, alas, a parade of self-importance, is it not) am always in a hurry and that my food had better be hot and ready to go lest you incur my wrath for keeping me too long from my appointed rounds. 

And just like the characters in Jean Paul Satre’s dramatic masterpiece, No Exit, we in that room were repaid for our speculations of how much longer we’d have to wait by—yes—having to wait some more.  And more and more and more.  And as I waited, as the minutes ticked away, something strange began to happen inside me.  I passed through anger, through rage, and came out on the curiously calm side of considering the absurdity of my situation.  I could leave, I thought, with no contract or bond to hold me here other than a sandwich order given to an old man.  Beyond that, however, was soon the idea, posited by the late, great David Foster Wallace in his quietly monumental This Is Water, which suggests the power to see through, and transcend, such ridiculous anxiety-inducing situations like, well, standing in line, require empathy for agent of supposed “slowness” (the grocery-store checker, in Wallace’s case, and Mr. Severson in mine) whereby one considers a litany of possible reasons why, just why, something—thoughts of cancer, of child support—is gumming up the works.

So I did not walk out on my sandwich.  I didn’t sigh.  I didn’t yell.  I did what David Foster Wallace would want me to do:  I tried very, very hard to be patient, to wait my turn, and see what culinary reward would come of my virtue.  So I relaxed.  I let go.  I handed myself over to the culinary gods to see what would me my fate.

I soon—or not so soon—got an answer.

Twenty-three minutes.  Twenty-three.  That’s how long it took the two grill cooks of Al’s Steakhouse to produce my single 9’’ sub (all—count ‘em—six ingredients of it), wrap it in white butcher’s paper, and drop it, unceremoniously, on Mr. Severson’s counter.

So I paid and escaped to my car, where I unwrapped the sandwich, took a bite, and promptly proceeded to burn—nay, scorch—the top of my mouth with melted cheese.  But once I got beyond the flash of cheesy napalm, I tasted something deeply, even profoundly delicious.  The sandwich was incredibly good.  But wait!  Was it a trick of the brain?  Was my delight in the sandwich simply the product of being starved for twenty-three minutes while happily contended diners around me gnashed away at their sandwiches?  So I took another bite, and another, and with each swallow, with each shot of beef juice dribbling down my chin, the verdict remained unchanged:  Mr. Severson’s sandwich was almost too good to be believed.  It was hot, moist, and deeply, deeply good.  It was everything I had wanted in a hot sub, and, more importantly, everything I ever needed a sandwich to be.

What this mushroom steak sandwich was, in point of fact, was not a Philadelphia Cheesesteak, as the restaurant bills its own fare, but a steak-and-cheese, for the fact the onions were not cooked with (and folded into upon cooking) the sandwich meat on the flattop.  Nor was it Cheez Whiz that adorned the grilled-onion and canned-mushroom topping, but a melted variety of cheesefood (which successfully approximated cheddar) that magically fused meat, onion, and mushroom into a sandwich whose sum, flavor-wise, is far, far greater than it’s industrial food complex parts.  The seemingly small, even inconsequential fact (call it culinary hair-splitting, or foodie wank-speak), that what Mr. Severson produces is a steak-and-cheese is a small, but significant delineation for a Washington, D.C. population of progressive eaters forever trying to leave its own culinary mark on global gastronomy beyond what the “half-smokes” of Ben’s Chili Bowl have already well-contributed.  The sandwiches of John Severson and his rag-tag crew at Al’s Steak House are just that important.  After all, it only stands to reason, does it not, that a restaurant still packed with patrons after fifty-seven years of continuous operation just might be worth waiting the paltry twenty-minutes required (this day) to procure one of their truly remarkable sandwiches.  Call it a pilgrim’s progress, then.  Call it me trying to stand in line like everybody else.  Lesson learned.  And yes, Mr. Severson, you are the man.

Al’s Steak House is open Monday-Friday, 10:00 am to 8:00 pm and Saturday, 10:00 am to 7:00 pm.  Closed Sunday.

Your link to Al's:  Cheese Steak Alexandria Arlington - Als Steak House - Philly cheese steaks to eat in, delivery available. Al's steak and cheese for lunch or dinner - best, good, local, hoagie, subs, Old Town Alexandria, 22314, Del Ray, Arlandria, Crystal City, Pentagon City, Northern Virginia, VA, Washington D.C.

Talking Italian With A. Litteri

It’s a dirty little secret of mine that I am now ready to confess:  I hate Italian food.  But wait.  Don’t get me wrong.  I am NOT talking about the Italian food of, say, that mad Italian genius from the Le Marche region, Fabbio Trabocchi of Fiola fame, who is not only revolutionizing Italian cuisine as we know it, but who has cooked some of the best food of any kind I have ever put in my mouth.  Nor am I talking about the kind of Italian food produced in the home kitchens of friends like Tom and Erica Petrilli, whose Italian dishes are so deeply delicious, and whose collaborative culinary prowess is so profoundly beyond my own, that tasting Tom’s red sauce makes me want to bang my head on the table, dent my soul, and cut a hole in my heart, because I know I will never, ever cook as well as Tom does, no matter how hard I try.  So maybe it’s not Italian food I hate, after all.  Maybe it’s that other stuff, the fake stuff, that basest and most low-brow culinary detritus that tries (and fails) to pass itself off as “Italian” food that I truly and deeply despise.  That stuff produced in the very non-Italian Sysco industrial faux-food processing facilities around the United States and later passed-off as “authentic” Italian cuisine by such Slobodan Milosevic-caliber gastro-war criminals as Bertucci’s, the Olive Garden, and Carrabba’s Italian Grill.  I know what you’re thinking:  Only an idiot with a culinary IQ of 6 would confuse Fabio’s cooking with the garbage that comes out of an Olive Garden kitchen.  Only a fuckwhit would fail to notice the shared gastronomic DNA of what comes out of an Old Spaghetti Factory kitchen with what comes out of a can of Chef Boyardee.  Agreed.  But where I’m from, the American Heartland (re:  “fly-over” states for you perennial coastal dwellers) the “authenticity” of these culinary shit holes is almost always without dispute.  In Iowa, in Kansas, in my native Missouri, the dross purveyed by the Macaroni Grill is Italian food for most people.  This means that for army of Midwestern eaters, Olive Garden’s fried fucking calamari is surely as authentically “Italian” as Fabio’s own and purely transcendent pine-smoked venison (with cipollini onions, foie gras, and rosemary, and likely the best venison dish anywhere in America, folks).  This also means that for a legion of farmbelt gastronomes-in-utero (as I was once) a Ragu red sauce-styled cuisine of laughable kiddie-food complexity (sugar, salt, and the occasional shot of dairy fat) is all they’ll quite possibly ever know of one of the world’s great and most sublime of cuisines. 

Unless.

Unless Fate seizes them by the short hairs and drags them half way across the country to A. Litteri, Inc.—that Holy Roman epicenter of all Washington-area Italian groceries, that Caesarian godhead for all D.C.-area Italian sandwich shops, and that veritable Puzoian Paradise where all Italophiles go to have their livers fattened and their bellies distended on an almost pharmacological array of Italian victuals that no Brando-in-waiting could ever possibly refuse, nor any garden variety Scorsesean wanna-be could forego without being considered a total mook. 

Because these are some truly mean streets one must navigate to find Litteri.  Because Litteri is located in Northeast Washington’s Union Market, an utterly bombed out four-square-block warehouse and meat-packing district hosting African butchers, Chinese butchers, Halal butchers, and other shady-looking sundries and restaurant supply vendors where you’ll need a business license (or a cool pair of Andrew Jacksons) to enter.  Union Market appears as the kind of place one might visit when needing to purchase a handgun or healthy white baby (in the parlance of the Cohen brothers), or where a person might unburden himself of his own extra kidney or trade-in his poorly used liver for a new one.  Union Market is just that kind of place and it’s what A. Litteri, Inc. has called home (and where the dead mobsters have been buried) since 1926.  It feels like the Capone era inside Litteri.  It smells like it, too.  An olfactory amalgam of spices, pistol oil, and cured meat.  And that’s a good thing.  How so? 

Because to enter Litteri is to fall down a culinary rabbit hole and enter an Italian fairyland of Old World gastronomy.  It’s a Platonic repository of every Italian food ever made exists in its one perfect form.  Floor to ceiling, front to back, Litteri is jam-packed with every Italian foodstuff a hungry gourmand could possibly imagine.  At the very front of the store are cases of highly quaffable wines selling at low-low prices ($3 a bottle and no doubt freshly fallen off the back of a truck).  Beyond that is the olive oil display.  Doubled-sided shelving stretching half the length of the store and crowded with hundreds of brands of olive oil, from the stuff so rare and expensive as to have likely been “imported” inside a human body cavity on a commercial jet liner, to varieties of oil just pedestrian enough to double as lube for your contractor’s nail gun.  Behind the oil display is shelving (and fridge space) devoted entirely to pasta.  Litteri has stockpiled enough fresh, frozen, and dried pasta (in shapes I’d never before seen) to get a person or three through the next plague or apocalypse.  End-capping the oil and pasta displays are shelves devoted entirely to potted fish (sardines and tuna), to capers, to olives, to canned tomatoes, to spices.  It’s easily the most densely stocked market I’ve ever seen.  It’s dizzying in its variety.  Vexing in its bounty.  Overwhelming in its offering.  But none of it, none of it, is why I’ve come to A. Litteri, Inc.

I’ve come for what you’ll find in the very, very back of the store.  I’ve come for Litteri’s made-to-order sandwiches, which, as I’m about to discover, are some of the very, very best that Washington (and Italian-American street cuisine) has to offer.  But tread carefully around the deli counter.  Be smart.  There are rules here.  There is a protocol.  You don’t rush the old man behind the counter.  You don’t bark your order at some pimple-faced, purple-shirted “Sandwich Artist.”  You write down your request in pencil on a form stacked on the counter.  Then you write your name.  Because you are accountable.  Because you will be nice while ordering your sandwich.  Because they know your name and can likely find out where you live.  So you choose two meats for your sandwich (capicola and prosciuttini, in my case).  Then you choose your two cheeses (I go with provolone and fresh mozzarella).  Then you choose your toppings (lettuce, tomato, onions, hot peppers) and condiments (Italian seasoning and dressing, yellow mustard, mayo).  You are then asked to make the most important decision of your sandwich eating experience; you are asked to choose your bread.  I go with the 9” hard roll (and so should you).  I say please and thank you while submitting my sandwich request.  I say it twice, and for my good manners, I am rewarded a nine-inch sandwich wrapped in white butcher’s paper.  I pay a very reasonable $5.95 and carry my sandwich, football-like, across pavement aglitter with broken glass, to the empty Subway parking lot directly across the street.  I sit on a short retaining wall next to a trash dumpster and tuck into what is surely among the best sandwiches of my life.  I bite at it.  I tear at it.  I rip and gnash.  And I know even then, even with a mouthful of prosciuttini and provolone, even with Italian dressing dribbling from my chin, that describing the perfect sandwich will be akin to describing the perfect sneeze in that both, sandwiches and sneezes, are so commonplace in life that describing an encounter with either would be tantamount to describing the properties of something truly banal—like a really good morning shower.  You’ll know it when you find it.  Oh yes you will.  But even as my powers of description fail me then (as they fail me now), I know that A. Litteri is where I will buy all of my sandwiches.  From now on.  For the rest of my time in Washington.  Because Taylor Gourmet is now dead to me.  Potbelly, a cruel, cruel joke.  A. Litteri, Inc has it all.  It’s a veritable Vatican City of culinary spirituality and material gastronomic wealth.  It’s where they’re keeping the good stuff.  It’s where I will from now go like some culinary pilgrim having once glimpsed heaven and hungry, very, very, for more. 

A. Litteri, Inc. is located at 517-519 Morse Street, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002

Their link is here:  Home Page A. Litteri, Inc.

You should also visit Fabbio at Fiola with someone you love or someone you desperately want to sleep with.  Fiola's link is here:  Home - Fiola Restaurant

And luckily, not everyone shares my opinion of Olive Garden.  Some people actually like it.  Here's Marilyn Hagerty's now-famous review in the Grand Forks Herald:  THE EATBEAT: Long-awaited Olive Garden receives warm welcome | Grand Forks Herald | Grand Forks, North Dakota

Eating in Gas Stations - Part One - The Political Sandwich

Who does this?  What kind of entrepreneurial madman would put an upscale eatery serving fare for wayward foodie hipsters in bespoke denim inside a decidedly bombed out gas station situated in the gastronomic wasteland of long-troubled inner city neighborhood?  Who would do such a thing?  A fiscal self-saboteur in the final throes of, say, bladder cancer or a nasty divorce, intent on total financial shipwreck to effectively dump his empire of net worth overboard and into a roiling sea of bankruptcy?  Or would it be the Birkenstock-wearing, patchouli-smelling child of privilege, some last goateed survivor of the dot.com age with elbow patches on his corduroy blazer and who is still delusional on the conviction that complimentary Wi-Fi and the free-trade coffee of pseudo-liberal self-congratulations will inspire denizens of this blighted urban ghetto to rise up in revolution?  Neither?  Both?

Restaurants, so goes the long-prevailing wisdom of food purveyance, thrive or perish not just on the savor of their fare, but where, precisely, they are located.  The ultimate success of a restaurant is based on a highly nuanced algorithm of Newtonian complexity involving foot traffic, proximity to public transportation, population density, parking, lunch traffic, real traffic, with the caprice of chance and calculus of bad or good luck thrown in to boot.  Culinary empires rise or fall on where, exactly, a restaurant peddles its fare.  Location, location, location is the maxim whispered under every restaurateur’s breath, the dictum tattooed across his soul.

Unless it’s not.  Unless the idea of the perfect location is, in fact, the worst possible location ever.  Unless shoving a high-end sandwich boutique up the ass crack of an otherwise unassuming and innocent inner city gas station is the blueprint for culinary excellence and financial triumph.  Unless you know the implicit fuck you inherent in subverting the expectations of the general eating public will act like equal parts cat nip and fish chum on hoards of local hipsters tipsy at 1AM on microbrew and happily willing to shell out fifteen bucks for a fucking sandwich.  Be the genius behind this location strategy sinisterly Machiavellian or blissfully accidental, it works.  It worked on me as it’s surely worked on thousands of others.  Because for an eater like me, like all of us, it’s not the location of a meal, but the context of a culinary experience that matters.  The success or failure of a meal is often not food-based, but situational.  Someone promising to feed me really great food in a shit hole is simply something I cannot pass up.  So on a sunny January late afternoon, I hurried to Washington’s 14^th and W Streets and the woebegone Lowest Price Gas Station that stands there to see what all the foodie hipster buzz on Fast Gourmet was all about.

In my experience, the rule is this:  if you have to tell me you’re gourmet, you’re likely not.  But once inside Fast Gourmet, I understood why they might have felt compelled to err on the side of obviousness, and why they might want to drive the point home.  Because inside the dining area of Fast Gourmet, all 300-or-so square feet of it, was a perfect microcosm of all that gentrification (or so-called “urban renewal”) brings to a city.  In the rear of the dining area were gathered a dozen or so neighborhood folks, all of them African American, whom the tide of poverty and institutional inequity had beached there, back by the locked bathrooms, with no where else to go and with nothing else to do other than to watch me, some over-educated white fucker in an Italian-made camel hair coat walk up to the Fast Gourmet counter and order a $13 sandwich and a $4 Pellegrino to wash it down.  Did the presence of Fast Gourmet awaken and enliven their culinary wonder, affording access to truly wholesome and delicious foods heretofore unavailable?   Or did the advent of Fast Gourmet ruin the availability of otherwise affordable and perfectly palatable, even delicious, gas station favorites like hotdogs and pizza?  Clearly none of the local folks were here for anything but a sense of community and bodily warmth.  Yet none failed to be anything but hospitable and downright polite.  So I ordered my sandwich and sat at the rear-most table beside them all, eavesdropping on all the neighborhood gossip and quickly forgetting my own white urban neo-imperialist guilt to tackle the formidable task at hand:  devouring a sandwich nearly the size of my head.

I had ordered the El Chivito.  It was huge.  A monster.  And the unofficial national dish of Uruguay.  The El Chivito is made of beef tenderloin (pounded cutlet thin), Black Forest Ham, melted mozzarella, green olives, bacon, lettuce, tomato, hard boiled egg, and an escabeche made from onion, red peppers, and garlic in olive oil.  It was delicious.  No doubt about that.  But was it thirteen dollars worth of deliciousness?  Was it dollar-for-dollar, inch-for-inch, a better sandwich than what I could grab at the local Blimpie inside the Shell station in my own neighborhood?

The ultimate decision would have to come from Amy T. of Living Social fame.  Amy just happened to come into Fast Gourmet as I was pondering this quandary.  It was a chance meeting and our first.  For those of you who haven’t yet had the pleasure, Amy’s the kind of woman for whom you stop what you’re doing to watch cross a room (that means she’s a hottie for all you sporting lads out there).  She sat at the counter opposite me and installed herself with a laptop and a Smartphone and a plate of really delicious looking food and began to encrypt her own Fast Gourmet experience into binary code.  Imagine a laughably absurd episode of Spy v. Spy and you’ve got the idea.  The irony that two “food writers” had converged on the same eatery devoid of any actual paying customers was not lost on me, nor was the hunch that I was party to everything I detested about gentrification.  I was, as usual, guilty as guilty could be.

So I decided to lighten it up a bit.  I decided to speak with Amy.  And being the smooth operator I am, introduced myself just as Amy was taking a bite of her sandwich, forcing her to answer my greeting with a mouthful of food.  She was having the lamb wrap with yogurt sauce and mint and yes, it was very, very good.

Amy smiled then and I knew the matter had been settled; the jury was in.  Fast Gourmet had been declared delicious by an industry professional whose very livelihood depended on her ability to suss out truly tasty food for an eating public perhaps too anxious or too busy to discover something like Fast Gourmet on their own.  And wasn’t cultural cross-pollination the point of this grand American experiment anyway?  Did not racial comingling and collision produce every great American and world shaping idea and art form?  Jazz?  Civil rights?  Rock ‘n roll?  Would not some ultimate good come from the influx of sudsy hipsters and khaki-wearing suburban foodie douchebags into this neighborhood?  Would they not see how others far less privileged than themselves were forced to live, with their noses pressed against the Fast Gourmet glass, forever unable to afford the deliciousness inside?  Would they not pay attention?

Or maybe I should take my cue from Amy, who is, no doubt far, far wiser than me.  Maybe sometimes a sandwich is just a sandwich.  Maybe I should chill out.  Maybe I should just shut up, sit down, and fucking eat.

Your link to Fast Express is below.  Enjoy the aroma.  I know I did.

 fast