Bentonville’s Yeyo’s El Alma de Mexico has landed on the New York Times 2022 Restaurant List, a compilation of 50 restaurants in America selected by food reporters, editors and critics from the New York Times as their favorites of 2022. Yeyo’s is the only Arkansas restaurant featured on this year’s list.
This flagship restaurant of a family business began when Hector Rios, known as Yeyo, turned a plot of land in northwest Arkansas into a small farm. The farm supplies the food truck that his son Rafael started in 2012, just as it does this restaurant, which opened in 2017 and focuses on the cooking of the Rios family’s native Michoacán. It has evolved to include cuisine from across Mexico, and the restaurant’s food is as good as its back story: mole-draped chicken enmoladas, crisp-edged memelas topped with queso and nopales, housemade tortilla tacos filled with aromatic cochinita pibil, juicy barbacoa and spicy lengua. There’s a burgeoning restaurant scene in this city, best known as the headquarters of Walmart. The Rios family is one reason. BRETT ANDERSON
Earlier this year executive chef Rafael Rios was nominated for a James Beard award in the Best Chef South (AL, AR, FL, LA, MS, PR) category. Rios was a semi-finalist in the same category in 2020.
Last year Jones Bar-B-Q Diner was the only Arkansas restaurant to make the list in the same year a fire almost destroyed the iconic Marianna institution.