Eat Great Cheap 2015Simplicity is a virtue too few restaurants try to pull off, but this tiny market/snack bar—the first retail location for the sausage maker 13th Street Meats—does it marvelously.
Although the links, made with locally raised meat, have been snapped up by the likes of American Ice Co. and the Black Cat, we prefer to dig into them here, where Motown plays alongside the sizzle of brats and onions.
The menu is succinct: six types of sausage, each $6 and served on a squishy Martin’s potato roll.
We love the juicy lemon-basil chicken variety and the half-smoke, which is—as always—best topped with beef chili and cheese. Those two ingredients are the centerpiece of one of the menu’s few diversions from sausage: the Chilito, a gooey cheddar-chili burrito folded into a house-made tortilla.
To drink, there’s nothing too fancy beyond house wine, DC Brau, and Natty Boh. And that’s exactly as it should be.
This article appears in our November 2014 issue of Washingtonian.
Ann Limpert joined Washingtonian in late 2003. She was previously an editorial assistant at Entertainment Weekly and a cook in New York restaurant kitchens, and she is a graduate of the Institute of Culinary Education. She lives in Petworth.
Anna Spiegel covers the dining and drinking scene in her native DC. Prior to joining Washingtonian in 2010, she attended the French Culinary Institute and Columbia University’s MFA program in New York, and held various cooking and writing positions in NYC and in St. John, US Virgin Islands.
