Tequilas Is Reopening … Today!

Tequilas restaurant reopens today, March 18, 2025 / Photograph by Laura Swartz

Like Center City has been without Tequilas for five years. Six. Seven, even. It feels like the fire that started in the kitchen of David Suro’s upscale Mexican restaurant on February 9, 2023, happened in a different era than the one we’re in right now. Or anyway, it does to me — and that’s why, when I got David’s son, Dan, on the phone this afternoon to talk about the reopening, I said the stupidest thing I possibly could right off the bat.

“So why has it taken so long to get the restaurant reopened?” I asked of the guy who has been trying every day to get it back open as quickly as possible.

And no shit, right? I bet it feels like it’s been forever for Dan, too. But I’m just this idiot with a toddler brain and no accurate sense of time passing, asking the guy whose family’s restaurant got gutted by a fire why it’s taking so long for him to turn the lights back on.

But it’s cool. I apologize. We laugh about it. And he says that it’s been a slog. “There’s just so much,” he says. “So many things. So many inspections. So many things you have to go through.”

At first, it seemed like a small fire that just came at the worst possible time — during dinner service, in the days leading up to Valentine’s Day, 2023. Everyone made it out safe — customers and staff. And the first responders said they had it under control within minutes.

Except, fires can be tricky.

They thought it was out, but, really, it was hiding. It had gotten into the ceiling. Into the ventilation system. In the end, it took hours. The whole place was filled with smoke. Firefighters were on the roof of the building (which, once upon a time, had been home to President Andrew Jackson’s Treasury Secretary and later the location for La Panetière and Magnolia Cafe), cutting into the ductwork. And no restaurant recovers from that kind of thing fast. Most don’t recover at all.

Tequilas bartender Dan Suro / Photograph by David Suro

But the Suros weren’t going to give up. Dan’s father, originally from Guadalajara, had opened the first Tequilas at 1511 Locust Street back in 1986. He’d been in Philly a year, working for a Mexican-themed restaurant called El Metate, which he bought from the owner when he was in his twenties and named it for the cactus juice that he loved. That became Tequilas’s first home. Years later, he’d move the entire operation down the street to 1602 Locust, to a building that he bought, and that was where it would stay. The fire? That was just a hiccup — a brief interruption in 30-odd years of service. And now, with Dan running things, Tequilas is coming back.

Or, really, is back. Because today is opening day. And the whole time I’m on the phone with Dan, he’s working through the million things that have to happen in any restaurant on opening day. They had the friends-and-family a week ago. Two weeks, maybe. And it went okay, Dan says. There were some things that needed to be dialed in. Adjustments to be made. Details, basically. Lots and lots and lots of details.

“It’s a … busy day,” he says, moving from one room to another, loud voices in the background. I ask him what’s going to change — what’s going to be new after two years of waiting and rebuilding — and he tells me basically that the new Tequilas is going to be exactly like the old Tequilas — except totally different.

For starters, it’s now half the size. Seventy-five seats, including the bar, down from a max of 155 in the old days. Because doing fine-dining Mexican cuisine for two turns of a fully-sat dining room? That was limiting. There were things they simply could not do when the kitchen was operating at that kind of volume.

Seventy-five seats, though? That’s still a good number of seats. And it will allow the kitchen (which has been completely rebuilt) to focus on a slightly modernized version of a menu that has always stood as a tribute to the cuisine of Guadalajara: shrimp washed in tequila, served in garlic butter with lime and chiles de arbol; cochinita pibil; beef molcajete; and tenderloin stuffed with mushrooms, epazote, and tomato, then dressed in an avocado cream sauce.

A huitlacoche taco served on a blue corn tortilla (left) and a couple of cocktails at Tequilas on July 22, 2022 / Photograph by Kae Lani Palmisano

The dining room got a remodel not long before the fire. And after, Dan has worked with artists and restorers to return it to its glory. They restored the gold plating, dug out paint on the walls that dated back to 1864, and redid them in one of the old, original colors. It’s a gorgeous room. Always had been. And now, it’s back.

The biggest change to the place, though, is that Dan has essentially cut the space in half. There’s the Tequilas side, with Tequilas’s old address, Tequilas’s old entrance, and all Tequilas’s glamour. And then, behind it, with a Latimer Street entrance, there will now be La Jefa, which is something else entirely.

Dan doesn’t want me to talk too much about La Jefa for a couple of reasons. First, because it’s still maybe a month out from opening. Second, because, internally, they’re still working out exactly what they want it to be. Daytime brunch and coffee, maybe. Very representative of the coffee culture in Guadalajara. But also, after dark, a bar. A great bar. Custom cocktails and its own menu. A fully different vibe than Tequilas. And that makes sense because Dan is, at heart, a bar guy. He managed the bar and drinks program at the old Tequilas for his dad, left to work at Franklin Mortgage, and now has come home again.

But like he said, La Jefa isn’t quite ready yet. It will be, and soon. But for now, his focus is entirely on Tequilas.

It’s opening day, after all. And Dan still has a lot to do before the first customers in more than two years come back to see what the new Tequilas can do.