Q&A: Dan Suro of La Jefa

While a restaurant fire can often spell devastation for its owners and employees, at Tequilas in Philadelphia, Dan Suro saw such a disaster as an opportunity to bring his dream bar to fruition. The renowned Mexican restaurant founded by his father, David Suro, helped shift perception of Mexican cuisine from casual fare to a fine-dining experience, and the younger Suro wanted to do the same for Mexican coffee, agave spirits, and ferments. After a fire destroyed Tequilas’ back dining room in 2023, Dan reimagined the space as La Jefa Cafe and Milpa cocktail bar.

The new spot, an ode to both Guadalajara and Philadelphia, opened last May and has quickly garnered accolades. Not only is it one of this year’s Imbibe 75 Places to Watch, but it won two Tasties awards (Craft Cocktail Excellence and Best New Restaurant), and the Suros are 2026 James Beard semifinalists for Outstanding Professional in Beverage Service.

We chatted with Dan about how La Jefa came to be, how award-winning Slow Drinks author Danny Childs got involved, and why you won’t find Margaritas at the agave spirits-focused bar.

What inspired La Jefa? 

We’ve been working with a restaurant group in Mexico called Risoma and Cafe Estelar. It’s formed by a really cool group of friends, artists, baristas, roasters, and a really great chef named Fabian Delgado Padilla. We’ve always been inspired by them and the scene that’s going on in Guadalajara, which always reminded us a lot of Philly. So that was the inspiration behind a lot of the products. 

But what really happened was the fire a few years ago. A month before was the anniversary of my mother’s passing. We have this barrel of blanco tequila that we had resting in the basement forever. So we just all took a shot, and everybody said “La Jefa” at the same time. It’s a double meaning because it’s a word for your mom, but it’s also your boss. And she was that role for a lot of people at Tequilas. It’s very much a family dynamic. So at that moment I decided that one day I would open up a bar and call it La Jefa.

Tequilas changed people’s perception of Mexican food; how is La Jefa an extension of that?

Tequilas is such an institution. Our agave program is very intricate. The heart of the program has always been celebrating producers and using the bottles to talk about everything that’s going on in the agave industry. We’ve always done that through the vehicle of a fine dining restaurant, which is very effective. I see us doing the same exact thing, being a window into agave, spirits, culture, but also Mexican culture. This is just a different type of vehicle to do it. You’re getting the same message, but we’re using cocktails to tell the story instead of fine dining.

You’re also doing that through the coffee program?

We just wanted to improve the perception of Mexican coffee in Philly. We have all Mexican beans and a similar philosophy with Mexican coffee and work directly with Cafe Estelar. So for our specialty bean pourovers, they’re natural or processed coffee roasted in Guadalajara. And for our house blends, we work with Mortal Minds who have popped up at Terra Madre.

Mexican culture wasn’t always largely represented in Philly, and there’s a huge amount of amazing Mexicans. You have Cristina Martinez of South Philly Barbacoa and Casa Mexico. And Amá, all the great places. But we’ve always been super nerdy here at Tequilas. Every little detail really matters. Philly has some really great cafés, but beans sourced from Mexico are overlooked.

But in Guadalajara, I’ve had some of the best roasted coffee ever in my life. We really wanted to zero in and focus on that. There’s some incredible stuff from Chiapas, Veracruz, and even Oaxaca and Southern Jalisco. And with everything that’s happening in this current political climate, it’s super important to support producers who are doing that. If they export to the United States, they have to be well represented. That’s the largest part for me, for sure. What Cafe Estelar is doing is incredible. Coffee culture in Mexico is coming up, and it’s awesome, so we just wanted to bring a little bit of that here.

Would there have been a La Jefa if you weren’t forced to reevaluate the space after the fire?

We’ve always been inspired by the people that we were working with in Mexico. So, we’ve always wanted to do something like this, but we never really finally pushed it. But, my dad, my brother, and I have been talking about doing some sort of coffee program or a way to bring some of that here. And when the fire happened, it was like, okay, we have this extra dining room that we use on the weekends. But during the week, we can separate it and make it an all-day thing, but like proper.

What’s Danny Childs’ role at La Jefa?

Danny and I are really incredible friends, and he helped flush out this whole idea. Danny and I connected because I really wanted to do some stuff with traditional Mexican ferments, which are also underrepresented. There’s tepache, but that’s it in Philly. So when the fire happened, I called him, and was, like, is there a way we can collaborate on this stuff? Because our worlds are the same, just from different cultures. The stuff that he’s doing with fermentation has been happening forever in Mexico, too.

Danny gave me incredible resources in local farmers for ingredients. But he also really helped connect the world of traditional Mexican ferments and what’s going on now with his book, Slow Drinks. He inspired the program. His way of thinking about cocktails just made everything possible. He was an active consultant as we were building up to it and it grew into a bigger relationship. 

We went to Mexico before the opening to spend some time with mezcal producers and also to find an old school Mexican ferment called tuba, which has been around for hundreds of years in a little state called Colima. We got to meet a producer of tuba, this 90-year-old guy named Don Ramon, and talk about how he’s making this palm tree sap ferment. 

Coffee and fermentation very much share the same seat. We’ve married some of the stuff like ginger beer, and sodas. At La Jefa Cafe, during brunch, you can get tepache and tejuino, which is one of my favorite ferments from Guadalajara, the masa ferment. But we have a draft system, so we ferment all of our own sodas, which are really awesome non-alcoholic options and are also used for highballs at night. Those are all fermented, clarified, and then we keg and force carbonate them. 

What’s been the most popular cocktail so far?

The Agave and the Paloma. We import tequila. So when we were closed, we found a way to get some of the cooked agave from the ovens. It’s vacuum sealed at the distillery and temperature controlled, and we ship it here. We ferment a grapefruit soda with them, which makes the best non-alcoholic Paloma, but we also make a cocktail called Agave. The cooked agave is infused back into the tequila, then we make an agave nectar, throw a little bit of salt in it, and it’s just a really nice. … I guess you can call it a Margarita? Or something like that. 

Speaking of, why don’t you offer Margaritas at the bar?

Let me start by saying that I love the Margarita. It’s one of my favorite cocktails to order at a bar. But at Tequilas, the Margarita cannibalized the rest of our cocktail program over the years. Everybody just wants a Margarita or strawberry Margarita or spicy Margarita. But in Guadalajara you’re not going to a bar to get a Margarita. And we have so much well-thought-out stuff on the Milpas’ cocktail menu. If we put Margaritas on the menu, we would not sell anything else.

And I get that this is a harsh way to put it. But we have the substitutes. We trained the whole staff to say, “I’m so sorry, we don’t have triple sec or orange liqueur,” but we’ll just put something in front of them. And it works every time. We don’t want to come off pretentious. We can still have fun, and you’re gonna have an experience. 

There are some really cool small producers of different liqueurs and stuff that we’re supporting from Mexico. Somebody can have a tequila and guava sour with a Guadalajara-made guava ponche and be just as happy.

How do you curate your spirits list? 

At Tequilas, we have a ton. It’s all really well curated, but there has to be more than 100 agave spirits on the back bar. But at La Jefa, we only have five at a time, and it rotates. We want to get to know each bottle and give a better guided choice instead of just offering 100 to choose from.

They’re all really beautiful, and they’re less than 100 liters a batch. And we don’t really have any mezcal cocktails, only one or two at a time. It’s been encouraging people to just have mezcal, which is just really cool. I’m a big believer that, if you have really high-quality stuff, the bottle will do the talking. We have people in their early 20s sipping on mezcal. That’s a win.