Hoagies' Heroes
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David Mazza, 30, and Casey Patten, 28, best friends since middle school, opened Taylor Gourmet, a Philadelphia-style deli and gourmet Italian market, at the end of 2008, in the ground floor of a three-story brick building at 1116 H Street NE. In the salad days before the ’68 riots, 1116 had housed a bakery, but since then it has played home to a hair salon, a crack house, and, for a time, just the rats and pigeons.
Photo by: João Canziani -
Casey Patten and David Mazza are most frequently found behind the counter of their Washington, DC, deli, Taylor Gourmet. When the friends and business partners aren’t slaving over chicken cutlets or slicing prosciutto, they take in the urban views from their respective apartments above the restaurant.
Photo by: João Canziani -
With a perilously limited budget, Mazza and Patten set about making the second and third floors of their new purchase into a pair of 850-square-foot, three-room bachelor pads. Patten's living room on the second floor gets all its light from windows facing south onto H Street NE.
Photo by: João Canziani -
Patten’s apartment is on the second floor, and though the layouts of the two residences are nearly identical, Patten’s initials on a support column clearly mark this space as his own.
Photo by: João Canziani -
Mazza and Patten both used off-the-shelf Ikea cabinets in their kitchens. They customized them by raising them up a few inches and dropping a sink into a store-bought table, which serves as the countertop. The pair is thrilled with the results. Even the architects they hired to work at the deli from Grupo 7 were impressed: “They said, ‘These cabinets are insane. How do we get them?’” Mazza recalls.
Photo by: João Canziani -
Mazza’s bedroom gets a bit of light from a window that overlooks the deli’s back patio.
Photo by: João Canziani -
Peeling back plaster and drywall they unearthed beautiful brick walls. They opted to leave them exposed, letting light from the street and a wall of rough-hewn red brick warm up the large living rooms and kitchens. Mazza's living room sofa is from Crate and Barrel.
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Washington was handing out chunks of cash to local businesses to jumpstart private investment on H Street NE as part of its $95 million Great Streets Initiative. Mazza and Patten applied for a grant to fund the roll-up garage door that opens onto the street, allowing patrons to dine en plein air despite zoning restrictions on sidewalk tables. They received $20,000, and though it didn’t cover the full cost of the door, it went miles in differentiating the deli’s facade from the surrounding block.
Photo by: João Canziani -
The roll-up doors on the facade give Taylor Gourmet an outdoor feel while the wooden walls made of recycled shipping pallets offer a textured, rustic feel.
Photo by: João Canziani -
Recycled wood, steel, and insulation; natural sealants; low-VOC paints; and the renovation of an existing building were all critical elements of keeping Taylor Gourmet as sustainable as possible.
Photo by: João Canziani -
“We said to Grupo 7, ‘We need you to use the cheapest materials possible, but in a really cool way,’” Mazza recounts. Chain-link fence poles hold up the racks of food in the market and support the grid of lights on the ceiling.
Photo by: João Canziani -
Patten fashions more than just sandwiches; the light fixture in the back of the restaurant (like an incandescent bouquet) is his own design of lightbulbs and vacuum tubes.
Photo by: João Canziani -
The market’s shelves are lined with all manner of Italian goodies, and the lighting grid on the ceiling, made of chain-link fence posts, is a nod to the grids common in Italian delis.
Photo by: João Canziani
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