Washington, it’s time to round up your interns and send them on a lunch run for the office. Give them a metro map (or if they’re good interns, cab fare), show them the Potomac Avenue stop, and point them to D.C.’s greatest sandwich shop: Mangialardo & Sons. Forget the overwhelming yeasty aroma of Subway or the turkey sandwich with two paper-thin slices of meat at your local food-by-the-pound, Mangialardos will scratch your itch for a meal’s worth of sandwich. What would you expect from a place that, for this straniero, translates to “fat eater?”

You can tell Mangialardos is the real deal when you line up behind three cops and a construction worker ordering for his whole crew. While it’s not much more than an ordering counter in front of a simple kitchen, Mangialardos turns out some of the best subs in D.C. Think the hour-long wait for an Italian Store sandwich is worth it? Well unless you’re looking for something along the lines of pate and brie, it’s not, especially when you have a small shop turning out better sandwiches in a tenth of the time.

In the 1950’s and 60’s, Mangialardos was a full-fledged grocery store catering to the area’s Italian families, but like many old-timey stores in Washington, time has changed things. While you can still get some staples like canned Italian foods and freshly baked bread, sandwiches are the backbone of this working-man’s deli. Not your standard ham and cheese, a Mangialardos sub is a small exercise in engineering; even the run-of-the-mill turkey sub contains what must be half a bird’s worth of meat. But if you’re looking for the experience of a many-meated Italian sub, Mangialardos has the solution.