Rafael Rios's cooking starts well upstream of the kitchen. On the family farm, the Rioses are still selecting and preserving heirloom corns for nixtamalization — after low-sugar, dense, heavy kernels — then opening the grain with cal, the calcium hydroxide that turns maize into nixtamal and nixtamal into masa. The work finishes in open view: Yeyo's El Alma de México at 8th Street Market is built around an open kitchen so you can watch the tortillas mixed and the masa milled, a sightline Rios treats as the connection itself. Behind it sits a cook trained in his grandmother's and mother's home kitchens and then in Army kitchens in Germany and Afghanistan across fifteen years of service, with culinary school arriving late and online, through Escoffier. The New York Times put Yeyo's among its 50 favorite American restaurants in 2022. At the 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival he cooked Oaxacan barbacoa beside his brother Román, representing Mexican foodways in the Ozarks. In 2025 the James Beard Foundation named him one of five finalists for Best Chef: South, his fifth nomination and the first to carry him past the semifinals. It all grew from the truck the family launched on the Bentonville square in 2012, in their own telling the first farm-to-table Mexican food truck there. The tortillas at the downtown Rogers mezcalería are still made in the 8th Street kitchen. Order the enmoladas, built on mole negro, one of Mexico's nine moles and the dish he says lays out the whole process. The Blue Demon truck on the square runs seasonally, so 8th Street or Rogers is the surer bet.