La Jefa: Where Guadalajara and Philly Meet

Cochinita salbut from La Jefa / Photography by Ed Newton

We’d been walking a while before we found our way to La Jefa. We had no reservations. No plans. When we ducked in off Lati­mer Street we weren’t looking for more than a place to have a drink and maybe a second drink to keep the first one company.

Funny thing was, we ended up eating dinner there. And staying longer than we had planned. Because La Jefa is one of those places with that kind of gravity. You want to stay, shredding house-made dried beef into bowls of fresh guacamole in the bright front room or slouching at the dark Milpa Bar in the back drinking small-batch mezcal from tiny glazed bowls and trying not to get any on your shirt. There’s just something about the ease of the place — the widely spaced tables; the small, bookish menus; the deliberately stuttered pacing of the courses — that makes you feel, for an hour or two, like the clock barely moves.

La Jefa has a voice. It has a style. It calls itself a Guadaladelphian restaurant, and that kind of definitional statement is part of its confidence. Owner Dan Suro has had a long time to figure out exactly what he wants to say here. He learned the ropes working with his father at Tequila’s until a kitchen fire early in 2023 shut the place down. What followed was more than two years of recovery, rebuilding, and delays upon delays. A lot of time, in other words, for Dan to look back at the history of Tequila’s (which his dad, David Suro, first opened in 1986) as one of the earliest serious upscale Mexican restaurants in the city and wonder what taking those same kinds of risks might look like today.

La Jefa is his answer. Living now in the back half of the original Tequila’s space (with a new, post-fire version of Tequila’s still operating on the Locust Street side), it is part coffee shop, part cafe, part experimental bar with its own fermentation program and James Beard Award–winning drinks expert Danny Childs as a consulting partner. It is its own thing, unique and evolving and complex and imperfect in all the ways that anything daring always is.

The pastrami-spiced tongue sandwich at La Jefa

Guadaladelphia. That’s zucchini, carefully cubed and blistered in the pan, then served cold and dressed in a tomato pesto with ground almonds. It’s cochinita salbut (pulled pork on a puffed masa cake set swimming in a sea of black bean and chili puree); pastrami-spiced tongue, sliced thin and mounted on sandwich bread with chili mayo, coleslaw, and manzano relish; and a fresh sugar doughnut with lemongrass pastry cream for dessert. It’s looking at the flavors of Guadalajara (where David was born and raised, where La Jefa’s chef, Fabian Delgado Padilla, hails from) and interpreting them through a Philadelphian lens, taking the entire idea of Americanized Mexican food and turning it on its head.

La Jefa is a coffee bar during the day, with chilaquiles and espresso shots sweetened with agave and topped with frothed milk. At night, there’s the full dinner menu in front and, in the back, a bar-bar: the Milpa Bar, dimly lit, separated from the main floor by curtains, with an excellent mezcal list (plus a staff that knows how to sell it) and cocktails that push the boundaries of what can be done inside a glass.

Dan Suro at La Jefa

So in the bright front room, we drink burnt tortilla mai tais that taste of honey and smoke and eat tacos dorados with shatteringly crisp shells, stuffed with rich, sweet barbacoa balanced out by the acid sting of roasted red onion. The short rib “Carne En Su Sugo” is distractingly artsy with its dots of sauce and cubes of blistered avocado, but so meaty and so tender and so perfectly paired with the puddled salsa verde that the plating feels almost like a gag. A joke that’s just a few degrees too high-concept to land right.

But all of this complexity and consideration is what makes La Jefa work. There’s a seriousness here gentled by warmth, an experimentalism tempered by fun. So even when the tortilla that forms the base of the carnitas vampiro is so brick-tough and dry you need a steak knife to chip it into pieces, it’s forgivable because the carnitas on top are so rich and delicious that you can taste the care that went into creating the dish and know that there’s no laziness in it, no lack of effort.

La Jefa’s Raspado cocktail

And anyway, those tortilla fragments can always be dipped into the thick consommé that comes on the side of the tacos dorados, left to soften, then eaten like the last chips in the bowl at the end of the night when everything else is done and there’s just us and a final round of mezcal left at the table. Because neither of us is really quite ready to quit the place yet, to get up and just go home.

2 Stars — Come if you’re in the neighborhood

Rating Key

0 stars: stay away
★: come if you have no other options
★★: come if you’re in the neighborhood
★★★: come from anywhere in Philly
★★★★: come from anywhere in America

Published as “The Spirits of Guadaladelphia” in the December 2025/January 2026 issue of Philadelphia magazine.