Beef heart is a mighty muscle, built to power nearly a ton’s worth of animal. But at Puerta del Sol in Woodside, Queens, it’s all melt, coaxed by smoke and repeatedly brushed with olive oil and its own slow juices on the grill.
As in the high, thin-aired Andean city of La Paz, Bolivia, where the owner, Jose Sanchez, grew up, hearts are cut down to mouthfuls and strung on skewers that arrive with burned tips.
They’re served with a sturdy potato and the mandated sauce: peanuts toasted with salt and ground to butter, then simmered with ají amarillo, an indigenous chile that ranks in heat alongside Tabasco and cayenne. What registers is less fire than sun-soaked ripeness.
Around 4,300 people of Bolivian descent live in New York City, according to Census Bureau estimates, with more than half settled in Queens. Only a few restaurants in the city have ever specialized in the landlocked nation’s cuisine, and several — Peña Grill, Raices, Cumbre, Renacer, Vergel Casa de Campo — have cycled through this Woodside address.
The food at Puerta del Sol is unfussy and dangerously ample, with potatoes represented in almost every dish.CreditJenny Huang for The New York Times
Mr. Sanchez, who came to the United States in 1985 at the age of 18, has owned a Colombian restaurant, Los Arrieros in Jackson Heights, for more than two decades. (Colombians outnumber Bolivians in the city by more than 20 to one.) In October, he took over this Woodside storefront and renamed it Puerta del Sol, after the ancient megalithic gate in the Tiwanaku ruins outside La Paz, carved out of one great slab of andesite.
Magda Riveros, the chef, makes food that is unfussy and dangerously ample. A broad flat steak comes with a drape of Colombian white cheese almost equal to it in dimensions, along with giant fava beans, wrinkly skinned and chewy, and a cob of mote (hominy), its dense kernels the size of back molars and steadfastly unsweet.
A meal may begin with salteñas, which look like grand empanadas, fat and upright, with a thick, nubbly braid on top. But their insides reveal an affinity to Chinese xiao long bao: The dough, tinged with sugar and gilded by egg wash, is wrapped around ice-cream scoops of chilled jigote — a soup-stew of coarsely chopped top round or chicken, loaded with olives, raisins and potatoes — which, as the salteña bakes, starts to seethe.
For charquekan, beef is hung to dry for three days, then boiled and struck with a mallet until it frays. Crisped in a pan, the strands emerge as a kind of ossified tumbleweed of meat, shattering and salty. It’s surrounded by triangles of creamy Colombian white cheese, a pale shoulder of potato and two hard-boiled eggs, waiting to be peeled.
Bolivia and its neighbor Peru were the birthplace of the potato, which may explain its omnipresence here, tucked alongside trucha (fried trout, harking back to its cousins in Lake Titicaca) and huddled under a stew of beef tongue and ají rojo, a mild chile with an intimation of smoked blueberry jam.
French fries are half-sunk in sopa de mani, a soup of beef broth and pulverized peanuts; somehow the fries soak up the broth without wholly losing structure, and are a delight.
It’s worth ordering a side of chuño, potatoes left to bask in the Andean sun by day and freeze by night, over and over until they turn black and hard and can last forever. They’re boiled until just slightly relaxed and taste of earth and tracts of time.
The dining room is spare, adorned with small paintings of tassel-eared llamas. Mr. Sanchez’s wife and son help out at the restaurant; an older brother (one of 16 siblings) cooks; a cousin handles payroll; and a niece, Ana Sanchez, runs the floor. “We’re very united,” she said.
For dessert, take everything: an exemplary flan; pasteles with featherweight shells divulging stretchy cheese, paired with api morado, a warm brew of purple corn and pineapple; and huminta, halfway between cornbread and pudding, to be unfolded like a tamal from its envelope of charred corn husk.
Or end with an amber sip of mocochinchi, made by submerging a globe of dehydrated peach in boiling water. Caramelized sugar is poured in, and cinnamon left to steep, imported from Bolivia because it’s “stronger and sweeter,” Ms. Sanchez said, bred to survive at altitude, leaching its memory of another life.
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