Stachowski's Market

Stachowski’s Market sits at the corner of 28th and P Streets NW in a clean red-brick building with a single black-and-white sign above the door. It is a butcher shop and deli, and what is behind the glass makes that plain immediately: two long refrigerator cases of house-smoked meats, house-made sausages, pates, rillettes, and charcuterie, plus a sandwich counter that on a busy weekend moves close to 300 orders.

Jamie Stachowski is a Buffalo native and trained chef who spent years running high-end Washington restaurants, most notably Restaurant Kolumbia. When that closed in 2008, he started making sausages in his garage and selling them at farmers markets, eventually growing a wholesale charcuterie operation with more than 75 restaurant clients across the city. His son Josef later gutted a former Georgetown market on this corner and opened the retail shop in 2012. Everything sold from the cases is made in house: sausages, duck prosciutto, Irish bacon, rabbit pate, pork rillette, mortadella.

The shop has earned the designation Pastrami House of DC through repetition and volume. The hot pastrami is about 1.5 pounds of thinly sliced smoked beef on rye, running 23.99 dollars, and it draws comparisons to Katz’s from customers who mean it as high praise. The Grinder, built from soppressata, salami, coppa, mortadella, provolone, and pickled red onions, goes for 21.99 dollars. The Infatuation described it as essentially the stretch Hummer limo of Italian subs, which captures both the scale and the experience. The sandwiches are routinely described as needing to be split between two people, which makes the prices more reasonable than the sticker suggests.

What Stachowski built on this corner is a specific and increasingly rare thing in American retail food: a shop where the person whose name is above the door is also the one who developed every recipe behind the glass. The move from a restaurant kitchen to a garage to a market to a wholesale operation and back to a retail counter is not a linear career path, but it produced something that neither a restaurant nor a supermarket could replicate. The charcuterie program is serious enough that the wholesale clients kept buying even after the market opened.

From 5:30 to 8pm daily, the Supper Club adds hot prepared dinners: baked salmon, smoked brisket, roast chicken, for 25.99 dollars each. Phone and online orders are prioritized over walk-ins for both the sandwich counter and the supper club. Open Monday through Saturday from 10am to 8pm, Sundays from 11am to 6pm. Street parking on P and 28th is limited but more manageable than the busier Wisconsin and M Street corridors. Order ahead through stachowskimarket.com to avoid the weekend lunch wait. The shop also sells bottled house-made sauces and spice rubs year-round for those who want to take the flavors home. Online ordering through stachowskimarket.com allows you to get ahead of the lunch rush, which builds considerably on Saturday mornings when the O Street neighborhood is running its weekend errands.