At the dining table, springtime is lamb time.
Lamb is a menu stable in all sorts of ethnic restaurants but especially those serving cuisines from the eastern Mediterranean–Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, northern Africa–and on into India and Pakistan.
Andalous Restaurant (3307 N. Clark St.; 773-281-6885) is small, friendly and offers four Moroccan takes on lamb, all at $12. There’s Fes Tagine (tagine is clay-pot cooking, and tagine applies to both the dish and the pot it’s cooked in), where braised lamb is cooked with onions and dried prunes, then garnished with almonds and hard-boiled eggs. Marrakech Tagine adds onions, tomatoes and spices to lamb and is topped with fried potatoes. The Famous Couscous–as you should already know, since it’s famous–features lamb and cooked vegetables over couscous. The Zagora Tagine graces fork-tender lamb shank with a sauce incorporating peas and artichokes.
Bring your own wine, something that goes with food that is richly spiced though not hot (except for the complementary little dish of fire in the form of a red sauce).
Greek restaurants are rich in lamb. One example is the Parthenon Restaurant (157 S. Halsted St., 312-726-2407), a longtime fixture in Chicago’s Greektown. Lamb there comes braised, in a crust of phyllo, roast (both leg and loin), and chops (both regular and baby).
When it’s on the menu, don’t pass up the lamb and artichokes. It is “market price,” not for the lamb but for the large, fresh artichokes in a velvety sauce. Customers applaud when whole pigs cooked on a spit in the window are paraded to the kitchen, but you’ll be cheering those tasty artichokes.
The most options title likely goes to Tiffin, The Indian Kitchen (2536 W. Devon, 773-338-2143), with 10 lamb dishes (and one goat) on its menu. Although Tiffin is known as an upscale Indian restaurant featuring dining under a sky-painted dome, the lamb chops, at $16.95, are a bargain. There are six good-sized ones on the plate. These are not your steak-house chops in that Tiffin’s are deliciously seasoned in yogurt and fresh spices then roasted in a clay oven.
Then there’s Goan Lamb Vindaloo from the west coast of India with chunks of lamb marinated in aged vinegar, spices and chilis, $12.50, or maybe Kashmiri Rogan Josh, $12.50, from the troubled region of Kashmir in the northwest. This lamb comes in a sauce of yogurt and saffron. Baluchi Barrah Kebab, $13.95, is said to carry “memories of tribal camp fires” from the Northwest frontier. And there are a half-dozen more specialties–not to mention the goat.