On the last morning of his life, in a little adobe schoolhouse in the Bolivian high-mountain village La Higuera, the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara ate a bowl of sopa de maní. It was Oct. 9, 1967. There was no road to the village, only a horse trail. Guevara was wounded and captured by the Bolivian Army the day before, but he did not know that this was the end, that he would be executed within hours. In one account of that day, a 19-year-old teacher brought him breakfast from her house: a soup rich with peanuts, an Indigenous crop, and fortified by noodles and potatoes. In an oral history published in The Guardian more than four decades later, she remembered that “he was so hungry he ate it all without catching breath.”
Recipe: Vegan Sopa de Maní (Bolivian Peanut Soup)
What is comfort food but the blessing of the familiar, a reminder that sometimes we require nothing more of a meal than that it nourishes us? For Guevara, sopa de maní, a traditional Bolivian dish that even the poor could eke out of meager ingredients, had probably become a staple of his time in the country. His compatriot Ciro Bustos, the Argentine painter, chronicles in the book “Che Wants to See You” how, on an earlier foray, a longtime member of the Bolivian Communist Party spent hours making soup for the guerrillas, crushing “a mountain of peanuts” and chopping “endless” vegetables. Sopa de maní was something of a luxury in otherwise austere lives. “We ate once a day,” Bustos writes, “to get used to what our future diet would be — at the best of times.”
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.
Some people call Patrick’s cooking “Americanized.” He shrugs them off. This is his interpretation of his heritage, he says: “how I understand myself through food.” When I taste the two soups side by side, one with brisket and one without, they are different, of course. But both are soulful and steadying, and spoonful after spoonful, I know that they are kin.