Copacabana Restaurant, 90-17 31st Ave, Jackson Heights, 718-565-9696
Before I booked my first flight, before I bit into kielbasa in Poland, taco de cabeza in Mexico or sabazushi in Japan, I ate around the world in Queens. It started when I was a kid, riding shotgun in my Uncle Adam's black Caddy Fleetwood as we headed to his favorite neighborhood joints. It continued in my twenties when I discovered that Queens was the most ethnically diverse place in the world per square mile, with authentic eats to match each culture. And it continues today, as I'm introduced to more and more fascinating foods in the borough. Case in point: The Copacabana Restaurant, the "place for authentic Bolivian cuisine," as their business card says.
My friends Nelson and Irma visited from LA over the holidays. Nelson is of Bolivian descent and heard of the Copacabana (named after Copacabana, Bolivia) in the heart of America's biggest Bolivian community, which not surprisingly is in Queens. I invited my friends Rosie and Graham and we all made our way to a brightly lit restaurant in Jackson Heights located next door to a laundromat, on a street lined with two-family homes and small apartment buildings.
The food was hearty, down-to-earth, a reflection of the rugged mountain geography of the Bolivian Andes. We started with soups. One was a peanut soup called Sopa di Mani. The other was Chairo, a thick, hearty beef-stock soup (complete with hunk of beef bone) served in an earthenware bowl. The soup featured barley and two kinds of potatoes, called chuno and tunta, one white, one blue. Nelson explained these were ancient varieties of potatoes that go back thousands of years. Wow. Fascinating, too, was these potatoes were naturally dehydrated -- traditionally preserved in Bolivia by sticking them in snow to freeze-dry. Wow. The soup was delicious and satisfying; it reminded me of my grandmother's mushroom-barley soup. Wow.
After soup we tasted escabeche, pickled pigs feet and vegetables, kallu, a vinegared salad of Bolivian corn, another ancient variety with huge starchy kernels the size of nickels that tasted like green plantains, and chicharones, fried pork with more monster corn. We drank Bolivian beer and moco chinche, a delicious traditional peach juice, lightly sweet but intensely cinnamon flavored, with peach pits at the bottom of the pitcher. As we ate, I checked out gorgeous photos of La Paz, the capital, the Bolivian Andes and Alpaca sheep that lined the walls. Guess where I'm traveling to next?
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