La Jefa, from the family behind Tequilas, is the Mexican all-day cafe and cocktail bar Philly didn’t know it needed
David Suro pioneered high-end Mexican cuisine in Philadelphia. Now his three children are honoring his hometown of Guadalajara with La Jefa, an ambitious cafe, bar, and restaurant.
For 40 years, David Suro has kept one foot in Philadelphia and another in his native Guadalajara. Along the way, he upgraded Philly’s Mexican dining scene with his white-tablecloth restaurant, Tequilas, and championed artisanal agave spirits with his company Siembra Spirits, a producer of coveted tequilas.
Now, Suro’s three children are building on his work celebrating Guadalajara by opening an ambitious bar-restaurant in the rear of Tequilas.
La Jefa, which opened Friday through its own entrance at 1605 Latimer St., is actually two spaces: a warmly decorated cafe with full-service brunch, and, opening in several weeks, an intimate bar-lounge behind a velvet curtain, serving dinner and late-night food and drinks.
For now, La Jefa opens at 8 a.m. daily for coffees and pastries, including a chocolate cookie stuffed with mole, lemon pie, and a concha with hibiscus and blackberry. The brunch menu, served 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday to Sunday, includes huevos verdes (scrambled eggs, spinach, cream), enmoladas (a corn enchilada bathed in mole with crispy pork belly and fried eggs), chilaquiles done as an omelet, plus sandwiches (tomato three ways, zucchini, house-made pastrami, and barbacoa). Figure on $14 to $17 for most.
Dinner, starting later in May, will include aguachiles and ceviche blanco plus a squash quesadilla made with black and white masa.
The Suro family calls the approach “Guadaladelphian” — a casual, contemporary counterpoint to the higher-end, pan-Mexican approach at Tequilas, which reopened in March after repairs from a 2023 fire.
La Jefa’s big play will be beverages. There are agave cocktails, of course, but also natural wines and ferments (such as tepache, ginger beer, and tejuino) through a collaboration with James Beard winner Danny Childs.
There’s a house-made ginger beer spiked with basil-infused Siembra Azul tequila. Brunch cocktails include a take on the light-ABV Garibaldi, which starts with squeezed-to-order green apple, grapefruit, or the traditional orange juices. At La Jefa, the juices become “fluffy” from a spin in a centrifugal juicer, a technique they picked up from Dante in New York.
The coffee is 100% Mexican, from Cafe Estelar — run by “people who have the same mentality on coffee beans as we have with spirits,” said Dan Cipolloni-Suro, 29, the youngest child. South Jersey’s Mortal Minds is roasting.
“In Philly, there’s not more than café de olla for Mexican coffee,” Cipolloni-Suro said. “But we’re not doing café de olla. That’s not what’s going on in cafes in Mexico.”
Besides a line of drip, Chemex pour-overs, cold brews, and espressos, they’re offering a cold agave cappuccino called agavatte.
Cipolloni-Suro and his siblings, David Jr., 39, who oversees La Jefa, and Elisa, 34, who handles finance, enlisted teams of Tapatíos, as people from Guadalajara call themselves: Fabian Delgado Padilla, the consulting chef, created menus for both restaurants (executed by head chef Jessica Sandoval, whose pastries also start the day); Isaac Padilla, an artist who helped design the new space; and Ricardo Cárdenas, a coffee expert. The branding company, Risoma, is from Guadalajara, too.
Shakur Armstrong, the head barista and head of fermentation, is a local but did time at Café palReal in Guadalajara and Enora in nearby Zapopan. Nik Shumer-Decker, who trained Dan Cipolloni-Suro as a bartender seven years ago at the Franklin, is head bartender.
La Jefa — “the boss” — is a tribute to the Suro children’s mother, Annette Cipolloni, who died of cancer at age 57 in January 2021, about two years before the Tequilas fire. (She and Suro had split up many years before but had a close relationship as business partners.)
The Suro children are honoring her with touches such as a framed caricature in the cafe and a neon sign in the lounge that reads: “You’ve come a long way, baby” — the old slogan for Virginia Slims cigarettes.
For years, the children had kept a barrel of Siembre Azul aging in the basement. They call it El Pocho, slang for a Mexican who grows up in the United States and adopts the American lifestyle. A month before the fire, on her birthday, “the whole staff did a toast,” Dan Cipolloni-Suro said. “My mom was the second mother to a lot of people, and everybody said ‘cheers’ for her and said she was ‘La Jefa.’ It has a double meaning — your boss or your mother. We said that the next concept that we’d do, we’d call it La Jefa.”