The Backyard Glaze That Became a New York Institution
The Beatrice Inn sat at 285 West 12th Street from the 1920s, when it opened as a speakeasy during Prohibition. The vaulted brick basement held a different kind of clientele in each decade before settling into a long stretch as one of the harder-to-get-into celebrity bars in Manhattan. By 2013, Angie Mar was running the kitchen.
Mar grew up in Seattle, a grandniece of Ruby Chow — the restaurateur who once employed Bruce Lee and a significant figure in the history of Chinese food in America. Her path into professional cooking ran through culinary school and time at Balthazar and the Spotted Pig before the Beatrice Inn. In 2016 she bought the restaurant outright, focused the menu entirely on aged and smoked meat, and built a dining room around serious technique and recipes that could take two or three days to execute at the restaurant level. She closed the Beatrice Inn at the end of 2020, amid the pandemic and a lease dispute, and later opened Les Trois Chevaux nearby — reworked and reopened as Le B in September 2023.
The rack of lamb traces back to a memory Mar described in a 2019 Maxim feature: her father glazing lamb with orange marmalade at Seattle barbecues, painting the glaze on in layers as the meat cooked until the top turned crisp and almost brûléed. At the Beatrice Inn she dry-aged the lamb, finished it over hickory smoke, and plated it with a reduced orange glaze and fresh mint — published as “Roast Rack of Lamb with Orange and Summer Mints.” Our make-at-home version keeps that orange-and-mint character but swaps the restaurant’s reduction for a jammier glaze of orange marmalade and apricot jam (the apricot is our own addition, for stickiness and body on a home rack that isn’t dry-aged or smoked). The ingredient cost for two racks at home comes to roughly $35 to $45.
What Makes the Glaze Work
The combination of orange marmalade and apricot jam is not decorative — each component does something specific. Marmalade brings bitterness from the peel and a more complex citrus character than juice or zest alone; that bitterness keeps the glaze from reading as simply sweet. Apricot jam contributes a rounder, stone-fruit sweetness and a high pectin content that helps the glaze set into something jammy and sticky rather than running off the fat as a thin liquid. The Dijon mustard adds body, a low heat, and a slight emulsifying quality that keeps the marmalade and jam together. The sherry vinegar is the acidic cut — without it, the lamb’s fat and the glaze’s sweetness become too similar in register and the dish tastes flat.
Applied to a properly rendered fat cap, this glaze caramelizes rather than steaming. The rendered fat underneath provides a textured, slightly crisped surface that grips the glaze; raw or underrendered fat is slick and the glaze slides off. This is the primary reason the recipe starts fat-side down in a very hot cast-iron pan rather than just seasoning and roasting — the 3 to 4 minutes of direct contact renders roughly half the fat from the cap, creating the surface the glaze needs to adhere and caramelize against.
Buying the Right Rack
A frenched rack of lamb for this recipe should be American or Australian, 8 ribs, about 1¼ to 1½ lbs per rack. Most grocery stores carry them in the meat case or can order them; a butcher is the better source if you want to specify the breed (Dorset or Southdown for domestic; Merino cross for Australian). New Zealand spring lamb is common and works well; it tends to be slightly milder in flavor than American and slightly smaller in rib size.
The rack should arrive already frenched — bones clean, fat cap trimmed to about ½ inch. If the fat cap is more than ¾ inch thick, ask the butcher to trim it or trim it yourself with a sharp knife; too thick a cap takes too long to render and the outer meat overcooks waiting for it. If the rack is unfrenched, ask the butcher to do it when you buy it. The bones themselves are not eaten but are natural carving guides — you always cut straight down between them, and each chop should have exactly one bone.
