When I was in elementary school, it was an annual spring ritual for all the kids to compare notes on how much chocolate and other candy they got for Easter. The lone exception was this kid named Dean Spiliotes, whose family was Greek. “We don’t celebrate regular Easter,” he’d explain. “We celebrate Greek Easter – it’s still a few weeks away.”

I always felt bad for Dean, who was left out of the fun while everyone else gobbled up their chocolate bunnies and marshmallow chicks. But it turns out I needn’t have worried – if the Spiliotes family holiday was anything like the traditional Greek Easter feast I savored last weekend, Dean was chowing down on way better fare than chocolate rabbits.

Some quick background: The Easter holiday celebrated by most Americans falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox (March 21), which means it can fall anywhere from March 22 to April 25. This year it was March 27.

But Eastern Orthodox churches, which became autonomous from the Roman Catholic Church in the year 1054, base their Easter date on the Julian calendar, not the Gregorian one. It all gets a little complicated (there’s a fascinating but elaborate calculation method at www.assa.org.au/edm.html), but the upshot is that Greek Easter is usually several weeks after “regular” Easter. This year it was May 1.

Anyway, here’s the point: The Greeks celebrate Easter with one doozy of a celebratory meal.

Since 1998, the excellent Midtown Greek restaurant Milos has been presenting a traditional Greek Easter feast ($85). It’s not just a meal – it’s a true cultural celebration, held just after midnight on the eve of Greek Easter Sunday, so that worshippers attending midnight mass at nearby Greek Orthodox churches can head directly to the restaurant to break their Lenten fasts. These people, who typically comprise about half of the restaurant’s customers for the event, arrive carrying candles (keeping the flame intact from the church to the meal signifies good luck for the year ahead), which they keep lit at their tables at the restaurant.

The candles make for a lovely tableau, but that’s just the culmination of an evening-long spectacle. The meal centers around roasted lamb – or, rather, 16 roasted lambs, which are impaled on spits and cooked over hardwood charcoal on the sidewalk right in front of the restaurant in the hours leading up to mealtime.

It’s quite a scene: The lambs still have their heads intact, sometimes with the tongue lolling to and fro as the animal turns on the spit. A team of cooks keeps a watchful eye, replenishing the charcoal as needed and periodically using bundles of fresh rosemary sprigs to brush the lambs with olive oil. It all smells amazing, and it tends to attract a lot of passers-by, most of whom look enviously at the lambs for a minute or two before saying something like, “Oh man, I wish that was my dinner!”

Happily, this year it was mine. But before my party could eat, we had to engage in a classic Greek Easter ritual. Sitting on our table was a basket of hard-boiled eggs that had been dyed red, signifying the blood of Christ. It’s traditional for two people to each hold an egg and sort of whack them together while saying, “Christos anesti”(“Christ is risen”) – it’s like clinking glasses and saying, “Cheers!,” but with a more forceful collision. If your egg doesn’t crack, that’s good luck.

But as I quickly found, there’s no bad luck to be found at this meal, which began with slices of tsoureki, a braided bread very similar to challah, with one of the red eggs baked right into the top of the loaf. It was served with mageiritsa, a traditional egg and lemon soup flavored with lots of dill and robust chunks of lamb offal.

Then came the main course: a massive platter of lamb and roast potatoes, which was ceremoniously placed in the center of the table. No fastidiously carved slices or neatly frenched chops here: The kitchen staff had hacked up the lambs into primitive-looking hunks and shreds, with lots of browned edges, skin, leg, and rib-cage sections with bones intact, plus a pair of kidneys – a suitably primal meal for breaking a fast. I can attest that it also looked pretty appealing to those, like myself, who hadn’t been fasting.

And it tasted as good as it looked. Juicy, tender, earthily flavorful – this was first-rate lamb. We had a great time passing the platter around the table, family-style, and soon we were picking up the leg and rib pieces and gnawing on the bones, all of which provided an appropriate air of festiveness. Okay, so none of us could get too excited about the kidneys (mealy, gamey, and generally off-putting), but everything else was spectacular.

I was already sated at this point, but the best part was still to come: a large bowl of loukoumades, which are little balls of warm, crispy fried dough that have been drizzled with a honey-based syrup. The first bite was a somewhat counterintuitive experience, because they looked a bit like new potatoes or pearl onions, but I quickly recalibrated my bearings to their addictive sweetness and found myself popping them down the hatch at an embarrassingly quick rate.

And that was it. Soup, meat, sweets – very simple, but extremely satisfying. And as a nice bonus, I managed to procure Milos’s recipe for the loukoumades (see accompanying recipe), which turns out to be relatively simple – a little touch of Greek tradition that tastes great all year long, no matter which calendar you use.

Milos, 125 W. 55th St., 212-245-7400.

Loukoumades
Courtesy of Milos

FOR THE BATTER

1 envelope active dry yeast
1 /2 cup milk
2 cups warm water
3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
Pinch of salt

FOR THE SYRUP

3 /4 cup of thyme honey
2 cups water
3 whole cloves
2 cinnamon sticks
Vegetable oil for frying
Chopped almonds and ground cinnamon for garnish

1 In a large mixing bowl, mix yeast, milk, and water until yeast is dissolved. While stirring with a wooden spoon, slowly sift in the flour and salt in three additions. Continue mixing by hand until it reaches a thick, batter-like consistency. Tightly cover bowl with plastic wrap and allow to rise until doubled in size, about 90 minutes.

2 Meanwhile, heat water, honey, and spices together until mixture reaches a boil. Remove from heat and allow to cool slightly.

3 In a large pot, heat about 4 inches of vegetable oil to 360 degrees. Using a teaspoon, scoop up dollops of batter and carefully drop them into the oil with the back of another spoon. Continuously stir the oil, making sure not to burn the balls of dough. Fry until crisp and golden brown and then drain on paper towels. Pour syrup over warm loukoumades and garnish with chopped almonds and cinnamon powder.

Yield: 24 to 36 loukoumades, depending on size.