Get there before ten on a weekday and A. Litteri is still waking up. The fluorescent lights are on, the coffee hasn’t been made, and someone is dragging a dolly of olive oil tins through the front door with a sound that ricochets off every shelf. You stand in the entrance of what looks, at first, like an Italian grocery from another era — because it is.
A. Litteri has been operating on Morse Street NE since 1926. The family has turned over twice, the neighborhood has turned over several times, and the warehouse district around it has gone from wholesale produce to food truck festivals to half-built condominiums. The store has not changed much. That is, depending on your age, either reassuring or miraculous.
The man you will probably deal with is behind the deli counter, portioning prosciutto di Parma with the practiced indifference of someone who has done it approximately forty thousand times. He is not unfriendly. He is just not going to perform enthusiasm at you. Ask him what’s good in the cured meats case and he will tell you flat-out, with no hedging: the soppressata is better right now than the salami, and the bresaola came in fresh Tuesday. He means it. He is not reading off a card.
The store is genuinely stocked like an Italian import house, which is exactly what it originally was. You will find fresh pasta in the cooler alongside a wall of dried pasta shapes that would take you a season to work through. There are San Marzano tomatoes in the large commercial cans, good balsamic in the $18 range and better balsamic in the $60 range, house-cured olives in a row of metal containers, and a section of Italian cookies that look exactly like what your grandmother served at Christmas if your grandmother was from Calabria. The bread comes from a local Italian bakery and goes fast on weekends; mid-week you’re safer.
The sandwiches are the reason people who live across town make the trip. They are built to order on soft Italian rolls, with combinations like fresh mozzarella and prosciutto or hot soppressata and roasted peppers, and they cost somewhere between seven and ten dollars, which is not nothing but is also not twelve-dollar avocado toast. There are no printed menus posted at an angle for Instagram. You tell the person at the counter what you want, they make it, and you eat it at a small table near the window or you take it out to your car.
The neighborhood, for those who haven’t been: Morse Street is not on any tourist map. It sits behind the old wholesale market area, close to the DC Farmer’s Market that runs Saturdays, and about a fifteen-minute walk from Union Station if you feel like walking. Parking is usually not a problem. The store is open Monday through Saturday; they close early on Saturdays, so noon is safer than 1 p.m.
You don’t need a reason to come here beyond restocking your pantry and eating a good sandwich. But the longer reason is this: the person slicing your meat has been doing it for decades, the sourcing is thoughtful in a way that predates trendy sourcing by about eighty years, and the experience of being in that store — the smell of it, the particular quiet of a place that has survived everything — is something you will not get at a Whole Foods counter no matter how good the signage looks.
It is a shop that is exactly what it says it is. In this city, that is worth something.
