Paterson, New Jersey, a short ride away on the bus from the Port Authority, is a hotbed of Syrian, Lebanese, Turkish, and Palestinian restaurants and bakeries. One of the oldest and most elegant is Aleppo Restaurant, serving the food of one of Syria’s largest cities, hard beset in the current conflict. Its cuisine is a wonderland of lamb, including the signature Aleppo kebab, ground meat laced with tangy, hot Aleppo chiles and cooked over charcoal. It’s served with polished rice, a flatbread, and a small bowl of Aleppo chiles.

Balimaya, meaning something like “family,” is a restaurant serving the food of the Ivory Coast and other West African countries. It’s poised just inside Mott Haven on Third Avenue as it sweeps into the Bronx from Manhattan, a very convenient locale for the professional drivers who make up a large part of its clientele. The lamb in peanut sauce is a classic dish in many African countries: big chunks of meat rimmed with fat in a thick peanut sauce. The sauce is made with peanut butter as an inexpensive convenience, but it’s mixed with other flavorings, including palm oil and Scotch bonnet peppers. And if you’re lucky, the lamb will really be mutton, giving it more flavor and a firmer chew. Served with polished white rice in abundance, because a little of the thick sauce goes a long way.

Founded in 2020, this Harlem restaurant — an offshoot of the Handpulled Noodle in Hamilton Heights — offers pastas in several thicknesses and shapes, along with dumplings and other Chinese street snacks. This northwestern Chinese stir-fry features the chain’s extra-thick noodles, dotted with lamb and slicked with a thick, spicy red sauce. Heaped with cilantro, it makes a very agreeable dish.

There’s one in the East Village, too, but why not visit the Szechuan Mountain House just off Prince Street in a shopping complex, which is more immersive in its portrayal of Sichuan culture and its place in Chinese gastronomy. Lamb abounds in modern Sichuan cooking, such as this dish of spicy lamb spines, which finds the ovine backbone immersed in chile oil and sprinkled with dried chiles brought to life by the oil. This is a dish for gnawers, and plastic gloves are provided to encourage one to pick up the bones and get to work. You bet it’s spicy, silly!

The fabled mutton chop of Keens Steakhouse (previously Keens Chophouse) is made of lamb and not mutton, but that doesn’t explain why it’s so big. The two-inch saddle chop weighs in at 26 ounces, and has a pronounced but mild lamb flavor to distinguish it from the menu’s beefsteaks. Enjoy it in any of the multiple Victorian dining rooms, COVID permitting, or in the barroom of this New York institution, founded in 1885 as part of the theater association confusingly called the Lambs Club, named after drama critic Charles Lamb.

The lamb tripe taco, with its spongy, wobbly, and crispy bits, will take your breath away. Don’t try to identify the morsels of tripe and other organs represented, along with some lamb barbacoa — just know that they make up a unified and cohesively flavored whole, and then order another. This restaurant deep in Corona, Queens, specializes in Oaxacan tlayudas, which I won’t bother comparing to pizzas. But the regular tacos and especially the tacos placeros are every bit as good as the tlayudas.

Let’s face it: The Cafe Breslin’s famous lamb burger is usually spoken of as the best in town, thick and juicy and presented with real distinction on a wooden cutting board with a serrated carving knife. That place has been closed since the pandemic and nothing else can quite compete, though this entry in the lamb burger sweepstakes from a little corner cafe in the West Village comes pretty close. The burger is thick and striped from the grill, the tomatoes themselves charred for extra oomph, and a whipped-up gob of feta proves itself better than mayo. The fries that come alongside, a complete necessity where all burgers are concerned, are also very presentable. I wish the burger were on a regular bun instead of a too-crusty baguette — but you can’t have everything.

Multiple are the muttons at this Garden State biryani chain in Jersey City’s India Square, located at the bottom of the hill in a well-furnished corner storefront. Two styles of southern Indian biryani are covered, but you’ll also find many curries from the same region, some relatively rare in the New York City area. One is gongura mutton curry, in which the thick, dark sauce is fortified with a leafy vegetable pickle with a sour and astringent taste. Indispensable to the cooking of the Andhra Pradesh state, gongura is also known as red sorrel or amaranth. Tart flavors explode, matching the powerful barnyard taste of mutton.

Hunky, shreddy chunks of lamb grace this pair of tacos, on homemade corn tortillas at this Greenpoint restaurant that was one of the first pricey places to explore the regional cooking of Mexico (and serve cocktails). As if the tacos weren’t beautiful enough in their strong lamb flavor, squash blossoms are heaped atop, along with watercress enough to almost constitute a side salad. A salsa made with the weed-like herb pipicha adds incentive to gobble these things down speedily and with delight.

Amazingly, this very modest spot has lingered on St. Marks Place for 35 years, turning out agreeable and inexpensive renditions of Middle Eastern standards with Syrian and Egyptian flourishes. In the context of this article, we’ll turn our attention to the lamb shawarma, cut from the rotating vertical spit with a generous hand and stuffed inside the usual fragile cardboard pita, which can barely contain it. Spoon on the tahini and harissa, the gritty and delicious hot sauce that originated in Tunisia but is eaten in much of the Arab world.

Lamb figures in several of the classic Moroccan tajines, which are dishes slow-cooked over a fire, charcoal, or a stove burner in a conical ceramic vessel also called a tajine. The version at the East Village’s Nomad — 20 years ago a Tunisian restaurant, but now one that covers the entire range of North African cooking — a meaty shank is braised with dried prunes and apricots and then sprinkled with almonds, to be eaten with your choice of rice or couscous.

This new hot-pink taqueria attached to a gas station in Jersey City is the only place in the area that I know of to offer lamb birria, which is a flavor revelation. But an equally impressive use of lamb is in mixiotes, an ancient dish that may have originated in Hidalgo that involves marinating mutton or rabbit in guajillo chiles, garlic, and vinegar and wrapping it in a parchment derived from the maguey cactus. At La Brujeria (“witchcraft”), lamb is instead wrapped in aluminum foil and steamed in beer and dried red chiles. The result is an almost surreal tenderness. Served with rice and pinto beans.

The ingredients with which the Uyghur larder is stocked are relatively few — root vegetables, fresh and dried chiles, green herbs, onions, and tons of lamb and mutton — but they are put to spectacular use. Uyghur pilaf, known as plov in Central Asian countries, is here presented in the simplest manner possible: rice flavored with meat juices and sweetened with carrots and cumin, atop of which are placed chunks of tender boiled lamb, an especially appealing combination on a cold day.

This place has a kick-ass lamb doner kebab — as with its cousins the shawarma and the gyro, the meat is sculpted onto a rotating cylinder with onions and other flavorings, and sliced off before being stuffed in a pita or loaded onto other forms of bread. But why not try one of the cooked-to-order lamb kebabs, such as the adana, formed onto swords from flavored ground lamb and cooked over a flame, making it smokier that the doner kebab? Then, have it plopped on vermicelli rice along with salad material, yogurt, and red chile paste. There’s another branch of Memo in Manhattan, at 23rd and Sixth Avenue, which is also good but not quite as good. Brooklyn itself lends flavor.