When Alma Alcocer came on board to Carlos Rivero’s El Chile restaurant group, Rivero had already ordered the sign for his spot on Barton Springs Road.

Alcocer and Rivero worked together at Austin fine dining mainstay Jeffrey’s in the late 1990s. When everything aligned for the longtime friends to work together again at El Chile, things happened fast. Rivero had planned a remodel of the El Chile restaurant spot at the location, and the sign company was halfway through production, so the new restaurant name would have to fit in the sign he already ordered.

“We need six letters,” Alcocer remembers Rivero telling her.

That’s how El Alma was born in 2011. The six-letter restaurant name is, of course, the first name of the chef, but in Spanish, “el alma” also translates to “the soul,” an apt description for the personal food that Alcocer makes in her kitchen.

A native of Mexico City, Alcocer studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and has worked in restaurants since, now as the executive chef of the El Chile group—which includes the group’s namesake and Peruvian restaurant Yuyo on Manor Road as well as El Chilito outposts across the city.

She describes the menu as “comfort food,” everything she would make in her kitchen culled from recipes in a life of cooking and eating.

“You can come in here and have a simple taco and a Topo Chico, or you can come in here and have the quail with mole and a bottle of wine,” Alcocer said. “I think that, in the heart, [Carlos and I] created something we both really loved. And also, we were in a really great place in the life of the city.”

In 2009, the CNN Business website featured 1025 Barton Springs Road—now El Alma—as one of the “five deadly spots” in the U.S. for a restaurant owner to open a location. Before Rivero took over the spot, three different restaurateurs had occupied the location in the span of five years.

But for the last seven years El Alma has been a mainstay on the busy stretch of Barton Springs Road leading into Zilker Park.

“I like to think a big part of this essentially is the neighborhood, which really embraced us and keeps bringing all their friends,” Rivero said. “Now we have a lot of friends.”