I was under the assumption that the soup was a stand-in for the bowling pins…

My head canon now is that the boss from OP’s post saw this comic and just wanted to know the answer.

I moved to SoCal in '05 from rural Georgia. Alberto’s was my first experience with SoCal Mexican fast food. Got a carne asada burrito. There was some exotic flavor in there that I couldn’t place, but it complemented the meat so well it easily became one of the best things I’d ever eaten. Turns out the flavor was cilantro. The Mexican restaurants from back home in the Southeast catered so much to non-Mexican tastes that they pretty much didn’t use cilantro in anything. I’d been missing out my whole life up to that point! I’m now living in the PNW, and while the Mexican food here is actually pretty good, I miss Alberto’s dearly.