Meet Center City’s best new cocktail bar — and its $27 not-a-margarita agave cocktail

Center City’s most interesting new cocktail bar is not a speakeasy, but it is a bar within a bar, all sandwiched inside a restaurant.

You’ll find Milpa inside Latimer Street’s La Jefa, which is itself in the back of its sister establishment, the recently reopened Tequilas. Walk past La Jefa’s tiled coffee bar, through a pair of arches draped with dusky blue velvet curtains, and you’ll enter the 26-seat lounge in a low-lit, black-spackled room. Reservations are recommended for one of the cushy leather banquettes or the two-top tables, but walk-ins are welcome at the bar, made from an epoxy-encased beam of wood salvaged from the fire that gutted Tequilas in 2023.

La Jefa Milpa is open Wednesday through Sunday nights (5 p.m. to midnight, 1 a.m. on weekends), as is La Jefa, whose space has slightly more seats, more standing room, and a brighter atmosphere. While the two concepts share a dinner menu — designed by Guadalajaran chef Fabian Delgado Padilla — they have distinct drink menus.

“We kind of wanted to do a choose-your-own-adventure-type deal,” says Dan Suro-Cipolloni, one of Tequilas/La Jefa’s family owners. “La Jefa cafe is a little bit more casual. Cocktails are just as good, but all the work is done on the back end. That’s where we get into the fun fermented things that are on draft, like the grapefruit and agave soda and the house-made ginger beer.”

Where La Jefa’s nighttime drinks program plays up easy-drinking cocktails — a tepache highball, a burnt tortilla mai tai, a tinto de verano (red wine and Sprite) with house-made limon aguacate soda — Milpa’s skews more nuanced and serious. Its 10-drink list includes a ginger- and lemongrass-inflected cousin of the mojito (Yerba Buena, $16); an intriguing citywide special (Tejuichela, $15, see below); and maybe the tastiest milk punch I’ve ever had (Ponche, $17), made with peanut butter-infused rye, tamarind liqueur, lime, and cucumber. There’s also a guava-and-rum combo that pays tribute to a local shaved-ice vendor (Raspado, $16), as well as a (literally) corny cocktail that stipulates a 10- to 15-minute wait time (Maiz, $20).

Conspicuously absent? A margarita.

That’s a hill the team behind Milpa will die on, says Suro-Cipolloni, one of the bar’s driving creative forces, along with head bartender Nik Shumer-Decker, fermentation director Shakur Armstrong (who’s responsible for La Jefa’s soda and coffee programs), and James Beard-winning beverage expert, Danny Childs, who is a consulting partner in the bar.

“It’s a very American thing to just grab the pitcher of margaritas. As soon as you hear Mexican restaurant, that’s all you get,” Suro-Cipolloni says. “When you go to Mexico, there’s such a rich cocktail scene, it’s really incredible. And margaritas aren’t ordered there.”

In place of America’s most popular drink, Milpa makes the Agave cocktail, an alternative take on a margarita’s traditional components (tequila, orange liqueur, lime, salt). The team infuses blanco tequila that’s made using a tahona (a volcanic stone wheel) with steamed agave imported from Cascahuín — the same distillery that makes the tequila, located in the lowlands of Jalisco. To sweeten it, what else but more agave? Not just any, though — a house-made syrup derived from the same imported agave. An ounce of fresh lime and a dash of salt from Colima balance the drink. Milpa’s bartenders express an orange peel over the drink just before serving, to fold in the missing ingredient.

Honestly, if you’re looking for a margarita, this drink isn’t it. It’s complex, slightly earthy, perfect to sip and think about, even if just a little. (Try the Yerba Buena for something more in the margarita state of mind.)

At $27, the Agave is Milpa’s most expensive cocktail. “It has to be,” Suro-Cipolloni says. “We import agave. The Cascahuín Tahona we use for it is already a $72 bottle of tequila. That’s the least we can charge for it.”

Despite the price point, the Agave has proved to be one of the most popular items on the menu in the three-ish weeks Milpa has been open. After bartenders walk customers through everything that goes into it, Shumer-Decker says, “People are like, ‘Well, there’s no possible way I’ll ever have this again. Let’s try it.’”

Another beverage Milpa offers that you’d be hard-pressed to find elsewhere in the area: tejuichela, a michelada riff that combines beer with tejuino, a fermented beverage made from masa, or nixtamalized corn dough. In parts of Mexico and the U.S., tejuino is a refreshing street-vendor drink that’s sweetened with piloncillo and often spiked with lime or lemon and salt, served over ice. (You can order the tejuino plain off La Jefa’s menu, $8.) Add beer to the mix and you have a tejuichela.

Milpa’s tejuichela pairs Human Robot’s Mexican-style dark lager with a tejuino made using masa from South Philly Barbacoa chef Cristina Martinez. The tall drink is served with a shot of Oaxacan aged rum. It’s one of the most sophisticated citywide specials around, but manages to be unpretentious at the same time.

“It’s a super-Tapatio thing and a super-Philly thing all in one,” Suro-Cipolloni says of the citywide riff. “We’re just marrying the two cultures.”

Straddling Philadelphia and Guadalajara, Jalisco — the Suro family’s other hometown — is the whole point of Milpa, named after the agricultural approach sometimes referred to as “three sisters” farming, in which maize, beans, and squash are grown in the same field. “It’s the idea that crops will grow and promote each other’s health in unison,” Suro-Cipolloni says.

You’ll find evidence of the “Guadaladelphia” cross-pollination on all the menus at La Jefa. “A sandwich is gonna be on Mighty Bread, even though it’s a Guadalajaran recipe,” says Shumer-Decker. “Or the choices that bartenders make in terms of putting drinks together — we all learned to bartend in Philly, so we’re going to have those instincts. These are the little ways that Philly seeps into all the recipes.”

Another, larger point of the bars at Milpa, La Jefa, and Tequilas is to help customers appreciate one of Mexico’s most treasured exports: agave. “The message across all three bars is: What’s going on in the agave industry right now? What’s going on in Mexican culture?” Suro-Cipolloni says. (David Suro, Tequilas founder and Suro-Cipolloni’s father, has a company that produces and imports agave spirits and has written a James Beard Award-winning book about them.)

Suro-Cipolloni points to mezcal as one of the foremost issues in the agave industry: Mezcal is made from wild agave, which is becoming increasingly rare as the spirit’s popularity has exploded. “High demand and overproduction in the agave industry is destroying the whole culture — the tradition of it, the socioeconomics of it, the agricultural element — so unless you’re gonna put on something out of intention, I don’t think [mezcal] should really be in a cocktail,” he says.

That eye toward the gritty realities of the agave industry is why you won’t find a mezcal cocktail on the menu, though you can order one to sip from their small but carefully curated inventory.

An intentional mezcal cocktail, he says, might use just a quarter-ounce of the spirit in addition to other ingredients that showcase products from the same region in Mexico. Whether customers appreciate that sort of detail or not, Suro-Cipolloni is dedicated to the mission. “I’m more interested in being a bar that has integrity,” he says.

La Jefa (1605 Latimer St., 215-475-5500, lajefaphilly.com/nuevo) is open daily from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.; 5 p.m. to midnight Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday; 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. Friday and Saturday. Reservations, which are recommended for tables, are available on Resy.com.