WASHINGTON – Karl Pederson stands at the front door of Leo’s GW Deli at 9 am on a Saturday. He is six foot four. He towers over the rest of the patrons in the deli. He listens to a fantasy baseball podcast on his Beats by Dre.



In front of Karl is a sophomore girl in black yoga pants and a black sweatshirt and white sneakers. She has AirPods in. She’s listening to break up with your girlfriend, i’m bored by Ariana Grande. In front of her is a freshman boy. He’s wearing wired earbuds and a Mets hat. He’s listening to Lights and Sounds by Yellowcard. Twenty five other students stand, single file, one in front of the other. They’re all wearing big coats over their pajamas. They’ve all rolled out of bed and shuffled to Deli, the only place here in this city where you can look like white hot death and be served with a smile.



But there’s a tradeoff. You and everyone else in line is packed in. You’re flanked by big long shelves and freezers that run the length of the store, all the way to the counter. They offer anything from Ritz Bitz crackers to frozen pizza to actual tins of sardines to Aloe to Banana Juice in a bottle. After you get funneled to the front of the line, it spills into an open chasm of milling bodies and flying sandwich orders.



You must pay attention now. Somebody behind the counter will emerge from the smoke to ask you what you want and, god dammit, you better get it right, because we’re all waiting on you. Don’t get distracted by the pasta salad or the pickle juice. Everybody around you sees it too and they think it’s just as gross as you do. Order your bacon egg and cheese on sesame and get out of the way. You must pick your drink now, and heaven help you if what you want is a Snapple. The Snapples are back the way you came. Turn right and you’ll see the Propels and Gatorades. Drink one of those.



Once somebody tosses you a bagel wrapped in tin foil, and be careful, it’s absolutely scalding hot, turn around and go down the other aisle back to the front of the restaurant. The gauntlet will take you to the front where the cash registers are. Take a look at their final offers: Big Texas cinnamon rolls and homemade pound bread. Take out your earbuds and listen to the local radio. Give Deli Boy your gworld card. He’ll ring you up with the charming efficiency of a German Shepherd come to life.



Karl takes a look at this circus and decides he won’t be a part of it today. He goes around to the right and walks to the front. The athletes do this too. It’s not about skipping the line, it’s about not believing in the commonly held idea that there even should be a line at Deli at all. Karl leans against the counter over to the right of the common area, and tells Joe that today he’d like to try something different.



He goes into his notes app and finds one he’s intrigued by: Sausage, Double Egg, and Cheese on a Cinnamon Raisin Bagel.



“We have come to one of my personal favorites,” he says afterwards. “The sweetness of the cinnamon raisin is topped only by a french toast bagel. Add in the saltiness of sausage and egg and you get bliss.”



Karl rates this bagel a 9.2 out of 10. His scale, he says, is between 5 and 10, because he cannot imagine something from Deli that would fall under that minimum.



From time to time on his Instagram story, Karl will field suggestions for Deli orders that he hasn’t tried yet. Then he will review them. He’ll first take a selfie of himself with the sandwich (and an iced coffee, always), and then he will take a picture of the sandwich so that we can all see it the way he sees it. Karl always sees his Deli sandwiches in the best possible light.



“You cannot underestimate,” he says, “the power of the double egg to make this sandwich rise above the rest.”



…



Now, I don’t think that your Deli order says something about the type of person you are. I do think that if you mix sausage egg and cheese with a cinnamon raisin bagel, you belong in a mental institution, but that’s beside the point. Many GW students take Deli extremely seriously, and there’s good reason for that.



Everybody at GW gets something from Deli. It is the only non-chain restaurant in Foggy Bottom that everyone can enjoy; those in all stages of life, of career, of hangover, can come in and get out in 20 minutes for $6.



It’s the only truly unifying experience that all GW students have. There suggests something communal about it. Deli is almost a Soviet outpost where they hand out rations to people covered in blankets.



“You get what I’m doing, and I get what you’re doing. I don’t care. I’m just trying to get my bagel,” says a girl in line to me. Her order is double bacon, double egg, double cheese on a plain bagel. I understand what’s going on with her today.



Deli is a New York bagel place, through and through. It was founded in 1945 by Italian-American Leo Ambrogi. His son John runs it now. It goes through 500-600 bagels, 20 gallons of iced coffee, 26 pounds of cream cheese, and 120 pounds of bacon per day.



Here at GW, obviously, people love their bagels. The New Jersey kids will tell you everything you never wanted to know about the Pork Roll vs. Taylor Ham debate. (Deli is political. They have chosen to call it Pork Roll.) If you’re from California, chances are pretty good you like avocado and hot sauce on your bagel. If you’re from Minnesota, that probably makes you want to throw up.



One of the women behind the counter is from the Philippines. In fact, all of the staff is from another country. 47 year-old Dian Nugraheni wrote a book about her experiences as an immigrant from the Philippines in DC. She, like the rest of the staff, works 10 hour days to support her family. And she, like almost everyone who serves food to GW students here in Foggy Bottom, is more or less integrated into a primarily white, wealthy GW student population.



Speaking of which, Deli thrives amidst Washington DC’s immense brunch culture. This city loves brunch in the same way that Seattle loves rain. Everybody complains about it, but there’s nothing more culturally unifying than that process of complaining about it and still experiencing it two or three times a week.



Going to Deli on a Saturday means you were too hungover to go to brunch (or possibly, not hungover enough). Similarly, going to Deli during the week means you were too tired to make food on your own. GW loves to make you choose to eat out. Would you rather spend $15 at Whole Foods assembling the ingredients required to make a terrible bagel, or would you rather spend $6 right away so you can eat a pretty decent bagel? To me (and to Karl) the choice is obvious.



Deli is closed on Sunday. I don’t know what to make of that.



Meanwhile, every other restaurant on campus is a chain restaurant. This is besides the grease-shimmering oases of Carvings and Gallery which, along with Deli and Crepaway, make up the Four Horsemen of the Culinary Apocalypse at GW. The food is too expensive everywhere else. There is no dining hall. There is only Panera.



“I once bought that big bottle of Aloe, actually,” Karl tells me. I am worried to hear this, but he explains. “At the time I was living in Mitchell Hall. I was eating only 7/11 pizza and a professor told me that drinking the Aloe would help with my digestion.”

“It did not.”

