The Ozarks Pantry Inspires Enviable Opportunities

All the right cooking buzzwords apply to Ozarks cuisine right now: hyper-local, super-seasonal, farm-to-table, nose-to-tail, pickle-rich and pig-heavy, not to mention virtually waste-free. But in this area, whose boundaries generally encompass Arkansas and southern Missouri as well as parts of Kansas and Oklahoma, these ideas are nothing new.

Innovative Ozarks chefs are creating menus the way the first European settlers— and even the Osage Indians who preceded them—approached food: Use what you have while you...