About Restaurant Openings Around DC
A guide to the newest places to eat and drink.
Excess isn’t usually the key to success for new downtown DC lunch spots. Salads, modest sandwiches, and assorted bowls seem to suffice for most of the office workers who haunt the weekday eateries near K Street. That’s one reason Mikey & Mel’s, which officially opens at the corner of L and 19th Streets NW on January 3, stands out.
The deli’s menu is huge, spanning bagels, reubens and turkey sandwiches, knishes, hot dogs, hot dishes like stuffed cabbage and kugel, omelettes, latkes, egg sandwiches, benedicts, and smoked fish platters. And the sandwiches themselves are, according to delicatessen tradition, piled high.
“Our inspiration is massive sandwiches, so a regular sandwich is a half a pound of meat,” says co-owner Harley Magden, who opened the deli’s first location in Fulton, Maryland with his brother Aaron in 2020. “Everything is supposed to have oversized portions.”
The two brothers, who are originally from Cleveland, named Mikey & Mel’s after their father and grandfather, the deli enthusiasts who first introduced them to the Jewish sandwich shops of their hometown. The Magden brothers primary business is windows—they moved to Maryland to start a window installation company called Window Nation—but their deli passion project came naturally. The brothers still run two restaurants in Cleveland, too.
Mikey & Mel’s original location in Fulton, though relatively new, is a defiantly old-fashioned suburban deli: gut-busting sandwiches, a pickle bar, placemats decorated with a corny “Jewish Zodiac” of delicatessen specialties, and many styles of crumbly cookies and cream-filled pastries in a fridge case up front.
The brothers hired a deli consultant who’d previously worked at the Baltimore-area pastrami institutions Attman’s and The Essen Room.
At the new DC location, they’re taking deli fare especially seriously: they’re making their own corned beef, brisket, roast turkey, and roast beef in house, and boiling and baking their own bagels, inspired by the beloved ones from New York’s Ess-a-Bagel.
“We literally went to New York, found the best bagels, brought them back and said ‘we need to duplicate these,’” Magden says.
The new location, which has already been busy during its soft opening stage, has touchscreens for ordering. Aside from them, the place is all old-school deli. Sandwiches come with free sides of coleslaw, potato salad, macaroni salad, or fruit. Black-and-white cookies are the diameter of your head. Among the foodstuffs available by the pound are sliced tongue, knockwurst, turkey sliced off the bone, and apricot rugelach. And the free pickle bar has plenty of options, from half-sours and olives to sliced horseradish pickles.
Plus, early-rising office workers will be able to stop by Mikey & Mel’s for a bagel or a pastrami-egg-and-cheese as early as 7 AM every morning, and breakfast service continues all day.
