Who We Are
Our Story
From medicine to food to functional wellness.
Three chapters
Medicine · Food · Wellness
01
The Beginning
Four years into medicine at the Westhill Institute in Mexico City. A 9.2 average. An internship offer from the American Hospital. Everything I had worked toward was right in front of me.
Then I had a bicycle accident in the French mountains. The concussion changed the way I think, literally. After that, everything changed. Later I read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, and the signs started lining up, moving me in a new direction. And then the thing that made turning back impossible: I found out that some of the doctors I looked up to most were being paid by pharmaceutical companies to write expensive prescriptions when cheaper generics did exactly the same job.
I had gone into medicine to heal people, not manage their symptoms. This wasn't that.
So I left. I spent years learning things that conventional medicine would never have taught me: reiki, shamanism, NLP, plant medicine. I trained at Crudessence in Montreal, one of the best raw food academies in the world, where I met Derik Sing, the man behind Alcami Elements. He taught me how to formulate adaptogen elixirs you actually feel in your body. I had been experimenting with ginseng since I was fifteen. Now I understood what I had been reaching for all along.
02
Botica Bistro
Feeding people has been my work for fifteen years and I still love it.
Botica Bistro opened November 27th, 2025, downtown Playa del Carmen, at the entrance of TOHOKU, the only gated community in the centro. I had spent months designing it as a plant-based concept. Then a friend from Montreal came to visit, talked me into trying a taco at a place she swore by, and that was the end of my vegetarian phase. The mental clarity hit immediately. I felt more grounded and alive than I had in years.
I changed the menu mid-build. Botica Bistro became what it was always supposed to be: a place where what you eat changes how you feel. Whether that is a perfectly cooked piece of protein or an adaptogen elixir in your morning coffee.
Patience and tenacity mixed with vision will get you to your destination.
03
3 TESOROS
People kept asking about the blend in my coffee.
When I got back to Mexico, the local supplement market was a disappointment. Nothing came close to what I had been using in Canada. Then I found a Mexican organic farm that extracts their mushrooms and roots through lyophilization, a process that pulls both the water-soluble and fat-soluble compounds into a single powder. That used to require two separate extractions. Now it is all in one.
That became Excalibur. Seven adaptogens, the same blend I have been refining for twenty years, now in a form I can share with people.
I put in about seventy hours a week. I take Excalibur six days out of seven. It keeps me sharp.
Next up is Arthuro, the full Excalibur formula with cacao and maca, ready to mix.
The Founder
Yonatan Torices
Former Medical Student · Chef · Founder of Botica Bistro & 3 TESOROS
Half Mexican, half Belgian. Former medical student who walked away from a system that prioritized profit over healing. Trained chef with years of experience in Montreal. Reiki master. Sound healing practitioner. Life coach. Founder of Botica Bistro, the only adaptogen bar in Playa del Carmen. Formulator of Excalibur. Using adaptogens since he was 15. Living proof that health is power and real food changes everything.
Not for everyone
For the ones who choose it, it is gold
Sometimes the answers arrive when you are ready. The question is, are you ready?
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