Two years after a devastating fire, Mexican destination Tequilas returns — as two restaurants

David Suro sat down to an early dinner with friends in a restaurant in Guadalajara, Mexico, on Feb. 9, 2023. Suddenly, his phone blew up with text messages from his neighbors 2,100 miles away in Center City Philadelphia.

Was everything OK at Tequilas?

Suro checked his restaurant’s security cameras through his phone. Flames were roaring from the exhaust hood in Tequilas’ kitchen, and smoke was everywhere. His son Dan and managers were shooing patrons and staff out the door to safety. A neighbor whose apartment overlooks 16th and Locust Streets sent him video of firefighters on the roof, whacking at the vent with axes.

Suro flew back the next day. The scene at Tequilas was as bad as he feared: Though the dining rooms were mostly unscathed, the kitchen was destroyed. For nine months during the insurance company’s investigation, Suro said, “we couldn’t touch anything in the building.” He said it was determined that Tequilas’ maintenance contractor had not adequately cleaned the hood and vents a week before the fire.

Only after the investigation could repairs proceed on the empty building. Since 2001, Tequilas has occupied the ground floor of the Duane-Dulles House — a grand, four-story mansion built in 1864 for William J. Duane, who was married to Deborah Franklin Bache, Ben Franklin’s granddaughter. The bold murals in the entryway, inspired by characters created by noted Mexican political artist Jose Guadalupe Posada, and the sumptuous dining room, whose Baccarat chandelier was purportedly given to a former building owner by the heirs of Joseph Bonaparte (the older brother of Napoleon and king of Spain), were largely spared.

» READ MORE: From 2023: How David Suro leads the charge as a champion of agave spirits

As patrons will see when Tequilas reopens this week, Suro and his three children made good use of their two-year ordeal. Suro brought in craftspeople from Mexico, including cultural-heritage restorer Karla Jauregui, interior designer Sara Casillas-Pereyra, and graphic designer Paula Silva-Ruvalcaba, to bring back the chandelier and gold wall trimmings as they were in the 19th century, and to restore the restaurant using archival photos and documents as guides.

Six layers of paint were stripped away. New furniture, china, and handmade tile flooring — 20 tons’ worth — was shipped in from Guadalajara.

Suro said that before the fire, he had been thinking about bringing in new chefs to consult. “I want all restaurateurs to believe in the future,” Suro said. “I’m not married to the idea that traditional food has to be ‘this.’ I’ve actually felt uncomfortable to see that most of the restaurants on both sides of the border have to be married to traditional dishes. I strongly believe that if cuisine doesn’t evolve, it goes bad.” He cites mole as an iconic dish that evolved: pre-Columbian mole was spicy, but the Europeans brought in sweet ingredients.

“I always want to know what’s going on with the chefs in Mexico,” Suro said. The new generation — his own children’s ages — are “doing beautiful things, and I want to do that. I see that they are evolving with respect, with vision, and with connection to the roots, and I think Philadelphia will be an amazing niche for this type of Mexican food. It’s like a flashback because in 1986, what we were doing was unthinkable [to many Philadelphians].”

Back then, Suro was serving traditional soft corn tortillas, deeply complex mole poblano, and Mexican tequilas in a soothing atmosphere at odds with the over-the-top cantinas of the day. Through the years, Tequila’s menu morphed as Philadelphia’s Mexican food scene became more diverse and polished.

The reopening, Suro said, “is a great opportunity to become avant-garde again.” Moreno, the executive chef, has maintained such dishes as the Caesar salad — with the dressing from the original Tijuana recipe — and the carne asada. A make-your-taco section reprises Tequilas favorites such as beef barbacoa and molcajete. First courses are priced in the teens, while second courses are $25 for the vegan tinga poblana to $42 for spicy head-on shrimp served with tartar sauce, arugula, and buttered bread.

Tequilas is open for dinner only, but the Suros also decided to turn Tequilas’ Latimer Street side into a second restaurant: La Jefa, an all-day cafe with a nighttime bar, accessed through a door at 1605 Latimer. It is expected to open in about a month with a menu that celebrates the contemporary cooking of Suro’s hometown of Guadalajara, in contrast to the pan-Mexican approach at Tequilas. The Suros enlisted three Tapatíos, as people from Guadalajara call themselves — Fabian Delgado Padilla, a chef, Isaac Padilla, an artist and cultural leader, and Ricky Martinez, a coffee expert. The menu, developed with Tequilas chef Eduardo Moreno, will include tortas ahogadas and tortas with pastrami de lengua.

“We call it Guadaladelphia,” said Dan Cipolloni-Suro, 29, the youngest of the three children, all of whom help run Tequilas.

In a partnership with South Jersey’s Mortal Mines Coffee Roasters, La Jefa will serve Mexican-grown coffee from Guadalajara’s Café Estelar. They are also working with James Beard-winning cocktail author Danny Childs on sophisticated takes on agave as well as pre-Hispanic ferments such as tepache, plus ginger beer and hibiscus soda on draft. “We figured we’d never have this opportunity to do all the improvements that we always dreamed of doing and let it survive for another 40 years,” Cipolloni-Suro said.

La Jefa is a tribute to their mother, Annette Cipolloni, who died at age 57 in January 2021. (She and Suro had split up many years before but had a close relationship as business partners. Six years ago, he married María Teresa-Marite Suro.)

For years, the children — Dan, Elisa, 34, and David Jr., 39 — 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,” 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 La Jefa.”

Cipolloni-Suro said that as he and general manager Oscar Serrano fled the fire, “my sister called me and said, ‘I told you!’ It was crazy.”

The anecdote dovetails into a spooky family story. “I don’t consider myself a superstitious person, but my mother was very into mediums and stuff like that,” Cipolloni-Suro said. “After she passed away, my sister visited her medium and the medium told her, ‘You guys have to be careful. There’s going to be a fire in the restaurant.’ She said, ‘Your mom’s trying to get in touch with you and warn you.’ I was just laughing it off.”

David Suro, now 64, was working in Cancún in the mid-1980s for the chain Carlos’n Charlie’s when he met and married Annette Cipolloni, a cement contractor’s daughter from Southwest Philadelphia, who was there on vacation. Expecting a child in 1985, they moved to Philadelphia, where Suro got a job at El Metate, a Mexican restaurant at 1511 Locust St., where Misconduct Tavern is now.

They planned to return to Mexico after David Jr.’s birth in January 1986, but decided to stay. That year, at age 24, Suro bought El Metate from owner Harry Shapiro and named it Tequilas, insisting on using Mexican ingredients and taking a high-end approach to dining. He said he had to struggle to find even cilantro, avocados, and dried chiles.

In 2001, Suro moved Tequilas to its current location and bought the building. Previous occupants included the French restaurant La Panetiere from 1971 to 1984, and the Cajun-Creole destination Magnolia Cafe from 1986 to 1998. Initially, Suro had renamed the restaurant Los Catrines Restaurant and Tequilas bar to separate the bar part from the restaurant, but shortly after dropped the reference to the Catrines, depicted in the lobby murals.

Suro’s passion has always been agave spirits, and in 2005 he founded Siembra Spirits in Guadalajara, which makes its own pure tequilas under the name Siembra Azul in Jalisco. Suro — whose book Agave Spirits, The Past, Present, and Future of Mezcals, written with Gary Paul Nabhan, won a James Beard Award last year — also has been a longtime champion of the Mexican community. He works with Puentes de Salud, the nonprofit clinic that provides medical and educational help, and started the Siembra Azul Foundation to support the agave farmers known as jimadores.

After the fire, the Suros’ generosity was reciprocated. The morning after, as Suro unlocked the door of the restaurant, chef Cristina Martinez rushed to his side with three kilos of barbacoa.

She figured that with the kitchen destroyed, anyone there had to eat. GoFundMe campaigns sprang up for the workers, who found temporary work while remaining close with the Suros.

“For our family and the Tequilas family, this has been an incredible lesson — a lot of negative things, but at the same time a lot of positive things,” Suro said. “One of the most beautiful things was support and love from the community — not just Philadelphia. People from all over.”

The support strengthened the family’s resolve. “There was just a shared attitude of we have to make it better,” Dan Cipolloni-Suro said. “It was the only option.”