Gluttony at Daisy May 

                                                                                

    A gourmandlich life is full of great lamb. The tenderest spring lamb at Chez l’Ami Louis in Paris.  The rack of aristocratic Jamieson lamb at Gotham Bar & Grill. The velvety marinated lamb chop just out of the tandoori oven at Devi.  I still recall the first taste, the startling silkenness more than 25 years ago, of lamb marinated Hunan style at the long gone Hunam.

     But recently, all other lambs fade, as I am haunted by the discovery, at an impromptu dinner party on 11th Avenue, of the taste of Adam Perry Lang’s sublime barbecued rack of lamb – tangy and sweet, rare, and astonishingly meaty. I had to have it again. It was no trick at all to talk friends into joining me for an encore in the no-frills back room at Daisy May’s, where you can watch the game on giant screens, baseball now, and across the room, a sixsome devouring half a pig.  Months ago, Adam Perry Lang, who divides his time between running the kitchen at Robert’s Steakhouse and strip bar, this personal fiefdom, and making the rounds of BBQ championships, wowed us at that first pigout with his amazingly moist Texas brisket.  “They booed me in Texas when the MC said I was from New York,” Lang had told us then. “But they cheered when I won the blue ribbon.”

    Now, as he slices our lamb rack, he gazes at our stylish coven – the women in Chanel jackets and blue jeans, and BBQ diamonds. 

    “I need to do something about these lights,” he said. 

    “Yeah, you could do surgery in here,” my guy agrees.

    “You promised to change those lights  months ago,” I remind him. A minion fetches a bunch of fixins': feisty baked beans with burnt ends, creamed spinach you won’t write home about, coleslaw techy with hot mustard, and Texas toast, which you think you can live without, considering the serious cow in front of you….'til you bite into the thick buttery brioche and your mouth says “more.”

    “I’ve got a couple new dishes I want you to try,” he says, slicing into a blackened hunk of barbecued short ribs, each slice jiggling in its rich caramelized fattiness. There are moans of ecstacy and defiant snitching of seconds and thirds. Appetites are flagging a bit by the time he passes along slices of roasted Carolina pork that he normally would serve pulled with vinegar... tender challenge to every cooked-out slice of arid pork you’ve had this year. There are a few final nibblings of short rib and beans revisited, since we will not dare be here again 'til our lipitor kicks in to mollify our arteries.

    Cubes of pineapple on toothpicks are the perfect palate cleanser.