SUNdeVICH
 Washington D.C.      Date of Visit  04/21/17        http://sundevich.com

Bantam King Chicken rewarded our meager sense of adventure with delicious chicken galore and we are looking forward to another place surfacing from our search, which features sandwiches formulated on flavors of far away lands, but built with local ingredients. It was the far away lands part that drew me to the sandwich shop, sadly…most of it seemed more focused the local ingredients which resulted in a shift from excited anticipation to dreary reality.
 

The service is as minimal as you are going to get, go to counter, say name of sandwiches, wait, go back to counter when your sandwich is sitting upon it. I would say the ambiance is grungy service garage, but if you read the secret location #2…I’ve had much better and interesting and comfortable and tasty meals in a literal working garage. There is room and butt placement for about a tenth of the people we saw while we were there, with most folks retreating to curbs across the street. If the sandwiches were great…I would happily endure fewer creature comforts…just didn’t pan out.
 

We tried parts of three sandwiches and ordered essentially a fourth as a salad. Overall the bread was fine, the fillings with a single exception were absent flavor, devoid of texture, and had apparently recoiled from any attempts at seasoning.

They have a sandwich, The Moscow, featuring what they call a Russian salad. You can also get the Russian salad as a side, which we ordered; btw it comes with a bag full of baguette ends…so the salad is essentially the sandwich. The salad is, essentially, chicken salad. The bound salad includes potato, egg, peas, gherkins, carrots, and mayo, none of which made it any different from your standard gas station deli case. Except the gas station probably has enough salt in theirs to bring out some of the ingredients.

We thought one standard, one weird, and one veggie would give us a pretty well rounded experience. The standard was the Buenos Aires...steak, chimichurri, sautéed onions. Steak cooked well but sliced to guarantee tough stringy chewage and no seasoning. Chimichurri sauce which should promise garlicky, herby, bright green pow, might as well have been colored on the bread with a verde crayon for all the flavor it brought and I saw onions, I just didn't taste any. Pass.
 

Weird...the Shiraz...beef tongue, mustard, pickled vegetables. I haven’t had oodles of tongue but have seen some serious chefs prepare it, making others say it tastes like the best, most tender beef roast you have ever had. This ain’t that. Maybe it’s how they do it in Iran, I’ll take the tender & tasty. Nowhere near enough weak mustard or veg to try to save this one.

The Cairo was the only sandwich nearing worth a stop for me. Hummus, cucumber, brined vegetables, walnuts, and fresh herbs all came together to fill the roll with bright and crunchy flavors of summer with a blanket of earthy and seasoned garbanzo bean puree. There are a bunch of other options on the menu but based on the averages we found it would be hard to sort through them all to find other worthwhile possibilities.