Three Years After Neighbors Blocked Her Café, Jezabel Careaga Has Found Her Opening

Jezabel Careaga in front of her new café on 24th St. Photo credit Ed Newton.

Nearly three years after neighborhood opposition derailed her planned café on Lombard Street, Jezabel Careaga is coming back to Fitler Square.

This time, she says, the business is different. The process was different. And the expectations, on all sides, may be different too.

“I’m calling this Jezabel’s 2.0,” Careaga said in a recent interview. “All the growing up that we had to do, we did it.”

Her new café, slated to open this summer at 617 S. 24th St, will return her to the neighborhood where her original restaurant built a devoted following. It also reopens questions that animated the 2023 zoning fight: what kind of businesses Fitler Square wants, and how they take shape.

Blocked by the neighborhood she loved

In 2023, Careaga proposed opening a café on Lombard Street. Nearby residents pushed back, raising concerns about traffic, trash, and the effects of a commercial use on a residential block. The project stalled.

The episode laid bare a tension Fitler Square has long struggled to resolve: how to balance its quiet residential character against the growth of neighborhood businesses.

Neighbors who did not forget

In the years since, Careaga said she kept hearing from people who wished it had gone differently: at farmers markets, on neighborhood streets, and in passing.

“I’ve been listening to this for a full year,” she said. “I can’t believe it. You should have forgotten about me already.”

What she came to understand was that the café had meant more than a place to eat. At her original location, students from the nearby Philadelphia School would stop in after class, sometimes without money, on the informal understanding that a parent would pay later.

“It wasn’t just the food,” she said. “It was that safe place for kids.”

She didn’t hesitate about extending that kind of credit.

“Of course,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I do that?”

That sense of trust, she suggested, was as central to the café as anything on the menu.

A menu rebuilt from scratch, and four-day medialunas

Careaga is not trying to recreate what she had before.

The new café reflects years of expansion, setbacks, and experimentation across multiple locations. The menu will blend familiar dishes with substantial new material: tapas, larger plates, and a steak entrée as part of a limited dinner service several nights a week. Argentine wine—a first for her business—will also be on offer.

At its core, though, the identity remains rooted in Argentine baking, and in the kind of painstaking technique that defines it. Her medialunas, a signature pastry, take four days to make, moving through stages of resting, laminating, shaping, and baking.

“Good pastry takes time,” she said.

The operation behind the café is more complex than before. A commissary kitchen in West Philadelphia will handle large-scale production; the Fitler Square location will focus on finishing, baking, and service. Separate teams will run daytime and dinner shifts. The goal is a business that can sustain itself without dramatically raising prices, even as costs climb.

‘They didn’t know it was me’

Looking back at Lombard Street, Careaga doesn’t take the opposition personally. She describes it instead as a resistance to change, one that unfolded without full information.

“People didn’t know it was me,” she said. “They didn’t understand what we were trying to bring.”

In her view, many of the concerns about traffic and trash might have dissolved on their own once the café opened.

“The moment that you put a seated café on that corner, people are going to slow down,” she said.

Still, she acknowledges that the experience changed how she approaches development. Not the business itself, but the process behind it. This time, she secured zoning approvals before making any public announcement.

“We did every single item the way that it was supposed to be done,” she said.

She has not heard from the neighbors who opposed the earlier project.

Testing the return, one pop-up at a time

The opening isn’t happening all at once.

In recent weeks, Careaga has been running sidewalk bake sales on 24th Street, drawing long lines and selling out in under two hours. The pop-ups are both a preview and a test: a way to reintroduce the business to the neighborhood before the doors officially open. (The next one is on Saturday, April 18th at 10am, at 617 24th St.)

She is also financing the project differently. Rather than taking on investors, she launched a Kickstarter campaign, continuing the self-sufficient approach she has maintained throughout her career.

The café is expected to open in early to mid-summer, with a soft opening before a fuller ramp-up in the fall.

For Careaga, the return is less about revisiting the past than redefining it.

“We’re not going back to what it was before,” she said. “We’re coming to be who we want to be now.”