Sheep Spines and Pork Kidneys at Long Island City's Newest Chinese Restaurant

The origins of the 30-year-old Organ Meat Society and our most recent outing to Jiang Nan in Queens

Braised sheep spine at Jiang Nan in Long Island City.

The Organ Meat Society was founded in 1997 by Melissa Easton, Dan and Becky Okrent, Marisa Bowe, and me. Rob Boynton joined soon thereafter, after writing an item on the topic for the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town.” The organization now has a core of a dozen members, plus a similar number who come from time to time. Ideally, it meets monthly, scarfing things like Mexican tripe soup, Pakistani scrambled brains, Uzbek sheep tail-fat kebabs, Moldovan tongue salad and pork neck, Argentinean chitterlings, grilled sweetbreads, and skirt steak (the cow’s livery-tasting diaphragm).

Increasingly, over the years, we’ve turned to the newest Chinese restaurants, places that tend to be more expensive than your neighborhood carryout, and which don’t pull their punches in serving dishes that Chinese expats relished back home, where they were advocating nose-to-tail eating long before Fergus Henderson.