Yelpers give it 4 out of 5 stars. The Accidental Hedonist says: "If you're a sandwich fiend, you can do no better than here." The Stranger suggests you get drunk and go (but what else is new).

We'll never forget the first time we visited Baguette Box on Capitol Hill -- it was either cloudy or sunny or rainy and it was around lunchtime a year or two ago, we recall every detail. We'd always meant to stop in, but the sandwich shop wasn't near anywhere we normally lunched, occupying the Pine Street isthmus between the Hill and downtown, so we'd kept putting the visit off until one day a friend insisted that we try a particular sandwich out: the braised pork shoulder with red wine baguette.

To this day picking another sandwich requires a wrenching effort of will on our part. (Not for us the drunken chicken baguette.) It's not for the finicky -- the baguette soaks through and the wine sauce runs down your forearms if you let it -- but it does introduce you to the feeling of your taste buds pirouetting. Today we were welcoming two friends of ours into the Baguette Box fold, so we let them begin with the braised pork shoulder, and ventured slightly off our regular path with with a roasted pork loin with apricot aioli baguette. And why not a beet salad in garlic olive oil? Why not some truffle fries?

We asked one of our companions to describe the meal in one word. He didn't hesitate: "Transcendent." To which we say, Shit yeah, bro! (for balance). Here's the menu for review; we're hoping to sample the house cured salmon gravlax and roast leg of lamb with cucumber yogurt baguettes one day soon. The baguettes themselves, by the way, are from Le Panier, and today's were crispy-crusted and just slightly chewy, an improvement from an earlier visit that left the roof of our mouth feeling scoured.

For us, the only serious drawback there is to Baguette Box (service is not rushed, true, but they claim that online orders are coming soon) is it tastes too good to be a daily lunchspot. We like to let some time elapse between visits. Two days at least.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user sweet olive.