La Jefa, the Suro Family's Guadaladelphia in Rittenhouse

In the photograph at the top of this page, the menu at La Jefa is a sheet of cream paper with the name printed across it in maroon capitals, and a lilac plate heaped with greens sits on it like a paperweight. Nothing about the frame is fancy, and that is what I like about it. I’m Harry Hayman, and I have known the Suro family and Tequilas for a long time. So when they opened La Jefa in the back of that building, behind its own door at 1605 Latimer Street in Rittenhouse, I went to see what they had done with nearly four decades of history. What I found is a restaurant that honors Tequilas without copying it. The space it fills exists because of a fire, and the name on the door belongs to the family’s late mother, so I want to tell the story in order.

What Tequilas Started on Locust Street

David Suro was born in Guadalajara, moved to Philadelphia in 1985 and opened Tequilas in 1986, according to the Tequila Interchange Project, the advocacy group he launched in 2010. The Inquirer’s history of the place supplies the detail I keep returning to. After taking over El Metate, a Mexican restaurant at 1511 Locust Street, David had to struggle just to find cilantro, avocados and dried chiles while he insisted on Mexican ingredients. In 2001 he moved to 16th and Locust, onto the ground floor of the Duane-Dulles House, a mansion built in 1864.

What David began there helped change how Philadelphia understood Mexican food, hospitality and agave. The Inquirer credits him with upgrading the city’s Mexican dining scene with a white tablecloth restaurant, and Philadelphia Magazine calls Tequilas one of the city’s first of its kind. My own evidence is smaller and more personal: a 21st birthday lunch there with my dad, and a brother who has been going his entire life. Some restaurants are places you eat. A few slip into a family that is not their own.

The Fire and the Barbacoa the Next Morning

On February 9, 2023, David sat down to an early dinner in Guadalajara and his phone filled with texts from neighbors 2,100 miles away. Tequilas was on fire. According to the Inquirer’s account, his son Dan and the managers were shooing patrons and staff out the door while flames roared from the kitchen’s exhaust hood. The kitchen was destroyed. The dining rooms mostly survived.

The next morning, when David arrived at the door, chef Cristina Martinez rushed over with three kilos of barbacoa, figuring that anyone standing in a wrecked kitchen still had to eat. That barbacoa says more about what a restaurant is than most business books do, and it came back around. The Inquirer reported that the Tejuichela at La Jefa Milpa uses a tejuino made with masa from South Philly Barbacoa chef Cristina Martinez. The chef who showed up with food after the fire is now in the glass.

The wait was long. CBS Philadelphia reported that the back of the restaurant, the old main dining room, had taken the worst of it, and the general manager counted twenty five months since the fire. The family used the time. They brought in craftspeople from Mexico to restore the chandelier, shipped in twenty tons of handmade tile from Guadalajara, and decided to turn the Latimer Street side into a second restaurant. Tequilas reopened in March 2025, and the damaged back room became La Jefa that May.

The Name on the Door

La Jefa is a cafe by day and a cocktail bar and dinner spot by night, according to the Inquirer’s opening report. It is also a name. Dan Suro-Cipolloni told the paper the words carry a double meaning: your boss or your mother. The family named the place for their late mother, Annette Cipolloni, who died in January 2021. A month before the fire, on her birthday, the whole staff raised a toast to her, and everyone called her La Jefa. The family said then that whatever they opened next would carry the name. Dan runs it with his siblings, David Jr. and Elisa.

Dan told Philadelphia Magazine that his mother’s favorite drink was Siembra Azul tequila with ginger beer and basil, and that it would be on the list with the ginger beer made from scratch. You can honor someone with a portrait on a wall. You can also honor her by pouring what she liked to drink.

Guadaladelphia is Dan’s word for the whole project, and it doubles as a description of the household. His father is from Guadalajara, and his mother, the Inquirer says, was from Southwest Philadelphia. It is a family tree with a pun for a name.

Guadaladelphia, One Plate at a Time

”We call it Guadaladelphia,” Dan Suro-Cipolloni told the Inquirer, and the Tequilas website uses a version of the word too. The Inquirer says the family calls the approach a casual, contemporary counterpoint to the more formal cooking at Tequilas, and La Jefa’s own site introduces the place as a meeting point for the two cities.

The Philadelphia half shows up in specific places. According to the Inquirer’s profile of the Milpa bar, one sandwich follows a Guadalajara recipe but comes on bread from Mighty Bread, the South Philadelphia bakery. A guava and rum drink called the Raspado tips its hat to a local shaved ice vendor. The bar team learned to bartend here, so those instincts end up in the glass.

The Guadalajara half is just as literal. Dan told Philadelphia Magazine that the tiles, light fixtures, counters, chairs and tables all came from Mexico. The coffee is Mexican, from Guadalajara’s Cafe Estelar, and the opening menu included a chocolate cookie stuffed with mole and a concha with hibiscus and blackberry, as the paper reported. I somehow did not know until now that La Jefa does coffee and pastries in the morning, which gives me an excellent excuse to go back. What I did get is in my photographs. One shows a cobalt plate holding a folded half moon of coal black dough, a pale sauce and a wooden handled knife. I will not guess at names for what I ate. The food is terrific.

Guadaladelphia is also just an accurate word for the city. Pew’s State of the City report found that 15.7 percent of Philadelphians were born outside the United States, the largest share since the 1940s. In a city like that, a restaurant that belongs to two places is a description, not a stunt.

A Milpa Behind the Velvet Curtain

The Milpa bar is the small room in the back. The Inquirer counts 26 seats, low light and a pair of arches hung with dusky blue velvet curtains, and says people without a reservation can sit at a bar made from a beam of wood salvaged from the fire. The fire that closed Tequilas for two years is now what you rest your elbows on.

A milpa is a traditional Mesoamerican field where maize grows alongside beans and squash. The corn stalk holds up the climbing bean, and the bean puts nitrogen back in the soil, as a study in Scientific Reports lays out. Dan told the Inquirer the idea is crops that help each other grow. Two cities, one field.

Then there is the agave, and the agave program is ridiculous in the best possible way. The Milpa list leaves off the margarita on purpose, and one of its most popular drinks steeps a blanco tequila in steamed agave imported from the Jalisco distillery that makes it. Two James Beard winners have a hand in this room. Danny Childs, a consulting partner in the bar, wrote Slow Drinks, and David wrote Agave Spirits with Gary Paul Nabhan. The 2024 James Beard Book Awards gave those two books the beverage prizes. The cocktail menu I photographed has a white negroni built on Siembra Valles blanco, one of the two tequila lines David created, and Food & Wine named him one of its inaugural drink visionaries in November 2025. I wrote about his tequila at La Chinesca in March, so none of this is new to me.

One more photograph keeps pulling me back. A Catrina stands on a back bar shelf in silhouette, her hat brim as wide as a dinner plate, an oval Siembra plaque glowing behind her and a mason jar labeled La Jefa Amaro at her elbow. José Guadalupe Posada first engraved her in 1912 as a satire, and she has become the icon of Day of the Dead, which Mexico marks on November 1 and 2. The murals in the entryway at Tequilas are inspired by Posada’s characters, the Inquirer notes, so she is family. I read her, watching over bottles in a restaurant named for a woman the family lost, as a quiet nod. Nobody told me that, and she may simply be a great piece of folk art on a shelf. I am glad she is there either way.

Honoring It Without Copying It

What I love most about La Jefa is the thing the family could have gotten wrong. David told the Inquirer that cooking which does not evolve goes bad, and he called the reopening a chance to become avant garde again. Dan told Philadelphia Magazine he hopes to do for cocktails what Tequilas did for Mexican food. That reads to me like a son saying out loud that he wants to be measured against his father’s best work and to do it differently. The room out front keeps its restored chandelier. The room in back has a beam salvaged from the fire for a bar, a Catrina on the shelf and no margarita on the list. Both are the Suro family. Neither is a copy of the other.

There is a civic point in here that I cannot leave alone. The City of Philadelphia says its plan for America’s 250th birthday, Ring It On!, puts neighborhoods at the forefront and aims to lift up small businesses. I like that framing, because attention does not create a neighborhood restaurant. It reveals the one that was already here. On Latimer Street it reveals a family that spent decades teaching Philadelphia what Mexican food, hospitality and agave could be, lost a kitchen to a fire and came back with two restaurants. Dan told CBS Philadelphia that most of the people working there are people the family has known their whole lives. Culture is infrastructure, and this is what it looks like up close: a crew that knows each other, a chef who shows up with barbacoa, a bar made from a beam that survived.

If you want to go, La Jefa is at 1605 Latimer Street, and its website lists coffee and pastries from 8 a.m. I have not had the coffee yet, so I know where I am going for breakfast. Bravo to Dan and to the whole Suro family. Mama would be proud.