It feels like a luxury in New York too, to eat sopa de maní on a cold and bright winter afternoon, at a plank of a table under a makeshift roof in Sunnyside, Queens. This is where Bolivian Llama Party makes its claim for Bolivian food as essential to the city. The owners are three brothers, Alex, Patrick (the chef) and David Oropeza — each contributed a word to the restaurant’s name — whose parents come from Cochabamba in central Bolivia, at an elevation of around 8,400 feet. (Maybe “restaurant” is too strong a word. For now, Bolivian Llama Party is just a takeout window and some minimal outdoor seating, opened during the pandemic when the brothers’ outlets in food courts had to close.)
What is comfort food but the blessing of the familiar?
I know there are peanuts in the bowl before me, but I can hardly taste them, beyond a low, earthy throb. (You have to be careful to get the ratio of peanut to liquid right, Patrick tells me, or else the soup will be too thick; it should be creamy yet delicate, hearty without heaviness.) There’s so much in it: Bustos’s “endless” vegetables — here, carrots, celery, bell pepper and the indomitable potato — and tubes of penne that are toasted first, to draw out their nuttiness and change their texture just enough that they hold firm in the soup. They need to be pulled from the pan when they’re still a shade shy of gold, Patrick advises, because they’ll keep cooking with the residual heat.
In Bolivia, the soup is topped with thick wedges of fried potato, like steak fries. Nobody minds when they get soggy. Patrick uses matchsticks instead, which fry faster and stay crispy. He primes the stock with a powder of pulverized locoto chiles, gutsier than jalapeños, and quilquiña, an herb that has the sunny grassiness of cilantro, with a sly kick. (In the summer, he grows his own; it may be easier to find papalo, quilquiña’s Mexican cousin.)
Traditionally, too, the soup is made with meat. Patrick likes it with brisket, which his mother, who favors chicken, finds controversial. But he also wanted to come up with a vegan version that delivered the same turfy undertones — “something that would make me happy as a meat eater,” he says. So he doubles up on vegan and vegetable bouillon and adds nutritional yeast.