There was less sauce than expected. But it certainly was boss.

The Sauce Boss, famed slide blues guitarist and gumbo aficionado, returned to Lake Worth’s Bamboo Room, Friday night. He was not clad in his trademark white chef’s outfit, nor did he whip up a pot of gumbo as the denouement to his trio’s blues set (my husband, who’s seen him several times, had been psyched about the gumbo, but as a vegetarian I wasn’t all that heartbroken.)

Instead, Bill Wharton was dressed in cool bluesman mode, in a white cotton shirt and a straw hat. But even without the food, the set, the first half taken from his new “Live at the Green Parrot” CD, was plenty tasty.

Having never seen a Sauce Boss show before, I was unsure what to expect — was he a novelty act? A chef with a guitar? A guitarist who got hungry between sets? Turns out he’s, above all, a performer — an expert one. I’m one of those critics who doesn’t judge apples and oranges — I don’t ask that a blues performance in a club hit the exact same beats as a big-budget rock spectacle at an arena.

All I ask is that you give me what you promised, and Wharton, make no mistake, does that. The man shreds, righteously so. Beginning with “Killer Tone,” reportedly the man’s life story sung in the key of blues, he and his drummer and bassist jammed joyously. There is nothing more fun than watching a band have fun, because their music is tight and their joy is infectious.

Obviously, there were more than a few regulars in the audience, who called out to Wharton and demanded that people start dancing, to which Wharton complied. The songs are funny, but they wouldn’t back the wallop they do if they weren’t so musically substantial and so well-played. Wharton’s voice is the perfect blues instrument — tunefully smokey, flavored with experience, a dab of melancholy and more than the daily dose of winking mischief. He did “Smuggler’s Cove,” the story of our state’s adventurousus pirate past in the long-ago days of the late 1970s, and the raucous “I Can’t Sit Down.” And he didn’t. And neither did the crowd.

So I’m a convert — I’m interested in seeing one of his gumbo shows, but I doubt it would make the music better. And for the record, even without the bowl of bayou goodness, we did get plenty of sauce, as we bought two bottles of the man’s hot sauce.