“What does shutdown mean?” It was March 2020, and this was the question that Jezabel Careaga, owner of her eponymous cafe in Philadelphia, asked her close friend Gabriel. English was Jezabel’s second language, and this was her first global pandemic.

“I couldn’t imagine closing my restaurant. I had already depleted all my savings. We’re living day to day. And now…Shut. It. Down. Food will go bad. I’m gonna have bills. I could not imagine going to sleep and not having money coming in my bank account. That was the first fear. Without money, you can’t pay your staff. You can’t pay your rent. I mean money is a resource for you to keep moving forward, to put gas in your car. I’m not talking, like, I want to go to Rome. I’m talking about buying bread and paying the people that work for you.”

Since she was a young girl in Palpalá, a small town in northwestern Argentina, Jezabel had dreamed of the place that she had recently opened. Assembled out of the three formerly dilapidated storefronts, her restaurant had big windows, lots of light, and white walls. She had designed every corner of the space and made the shelves, seating, tables, and even the chef’s counter in a local wood shop. Her menu featured the food of her childhood: empanadas, ham and cheese medialunas, homey soups, fresh pasta, and delicious treats like alfajores. Set on the edge of Spruce Hill in the City of Brotherly Love, the neighborhood was diverse, the streets leafy, and the old Victorian houses bountiful. Best of all, Jezabel’s was all hers, of her own creation. Now, it might be lost.

Jezabel is the oldest of four children. Her father worked in a steel mill. He was “shy, loving, put one foot in front of the other, steady Eddie.” Her mother was an office clerk at the mill. “She’s bright, quick, and acts on her feet. She is like a spark.” Jezabel is a combination of the two. “A steady spark,” a friend once called her.

“From the time I was a baby, my grandmother Julia took care of me. My Dad dropped me off every morning and picked me up every night. Five days a week. I have so many beautiful memories of just running around the narrow kitchen with my ‘Abuela’, peeling potatoes, making pasta, rolling dough. She made bread once a week in the brick oven my grandfather had built her and shared her creations with her family and neighbors. It was such a simple act of caring, giving someone bread. She took me shopping every day too. We’d walk through town, past the old railroad station. She would hold my hand the whole time. She was always holding my hand. We’d start at the grocery store, then go to the bakery, and finish at the butcher. I would say hello to everybody. The bakery was the highlight of my day. Danielo’s. I was mesmerized by the pastry case. Sometimes, I would look at her, then point at the factura (a pastry filled with egg custard). I wouldn’t have to say anything. Every once in a while came the sweet words from my grandmother to the clerk, ‘Una factura, por favor.’ It brought me a lot of joy, and for her too, I imagine. She could do that little thing. That’s all you’re left with, those moments.”

Until she was five years old, Jezabel spent her days with her grandmother in this “warm and loving world full of possibilities.” Then came kindergarten and siblings. “I had such a hard time going to school. I used to scream my lungs out and grab my dad’s leg when he tried to leave me there. Why do I have to be with other kids? I thought.” She wanted to be back in her abuela’s kitchen. After school, she would either spend the afternoons cooking with her grandmother or go home with friends to make pastries. For birthday parties, she and her mom made alfajores, lining up the cookies like little soldiers in a sheet pan to be baked. Jezabel’s favorite television show was “El Panadero y El Pastelero” (“The Baker and the Pastry Maker”), though she didn’t share that with her classmates to avoid being teased.

After graduating college, then earning her MBA, she aimed to travel the world and have a career in hotel management. In her mind’s eye, she envisioned returning to San Salvador de Jujuy, the city near Palpalá, by the time she was forty years old. She would open a “tea house” with lots of glass and light and serving local Argentinean food. One day, far in the future.

“Three to five seconds. An instant. That’s all it takes to truly change your life.”

At 25 years old, Jezabel moved to the United States. She got a job working at the 800-room Loews Miami Beach Hotel. While lounging at the pool one afternoon, she met a Philadelphia businessman. Shortly into the conversation, he mentioned owning a property in his hometown that would be perfect for a café. “Oh, that’s nice,” Jezabel thought, thinking nothing of it. Later, they headed toward the elevators to return to their rooms. Separately. “I’m going to go out to dinner. Do you want to come?” He asked as they rode the elevator upward. “Maybe, I don’t know…” He offered her his phone number. “Just call me,” he said. They arrived at her floor. The doors opened. She stepped out. “You’re not going to give me your number?” he asked. “It’s just to grab dinner.” In that moment, she made her choice. “Room 830,” she said, giving him a way to contact her. The elevator doors closed. Fifteen minutes later, he called, and they went to dinner.

“And that was it. The time it took for me to say ‘Room 830’. That changed my story.”

The two started a friendship. After her training at the Loews hotel, Jezabel moved to Philadelphia. In 2010, she opened a cafe on a narrow, somewhat dark, sliver of space at 26th and Pine in the city center that her friend owned. The café built a steady following, and Jezabel introduced tastes from home, beginning with empanadas. It was her dream partly realized. Several years later, she started thinking of expanding into a new, bigger place, one that matched the vision of her youth. Eventually, she found a brightly-lit storefront in Spruce Hill that looked just right. Deciding to take the leap, she ran out her lease on 26th Street. She worked from dawn until ten at night readying to open. It was a seven-week harried rush.

“Running your own business can be a lonely effort. I push for everything single thing that happens, mostly by myself. Work for me, it’s just the way I live. It’s a blend between my personal life, my work life, and everything else…I will work until the day I take my last breath and that’s okay. I don’t want to be carrying a bag of 50-pound flour when that happens, right? I’m hoping it will evolve and I will grow, and I’ll keep moving. That’s the exhilarating part.”

By early 2020, Jezabel’s was finally ready to fly. Then the pandemic hit, and everything in the city went still.

“You’re an essential business,” Gabriel told Jezabel. She could stay open during the shutdown. “Okay,” she thought. “I can figure everything else out.” Jezabel tightened up operations, shrunk staff hours, and transitioned to a Covid world. Online orders. Doorstep deliveries.. Pastries and coffee sold behind glass panels. Live cooking lessons on Instagram. Alfajores gift boxes shipped across the country. Gabriel pitched in to help, becoming her back office manager. Her staff, those who remained in Philadelphia, also supported the efforts.

Most important, there was her father Raul. He and her uncle Hector had arrived in Philadelphia shortly before the borders closed. Unable to leave the United States, they were now living in her basement. “I’m going to work Monday through Saturday, from 7:30 until late,” Jezabel told them. “You can come if you want. Be ready in the car every morning if you do.”

“Every day I came downstairs from my bedroom and my Dad or uncle had already made me coffee in the French press. Then they came to work.”

Hector painted the whole restaurant and did other odd jobs. “My father turned up his sleeves and worked beside me in the kitchen. He is diabetic, so we had to be careful. He chopped onions, made empanadas, rolled pasta dough, washed dishes, and cooked lunch for all of us. Then we packed the car trunk at four o’clock and headed out for deliveries. We added special cakes to the menu and delivered them with handwritten notes. ‘This is how you’re going to see Philadelphia, from the backseat,’ Jezabel joked.

On Sundays, Jezabel urged her father to rest at home while she went to the restaurant to work alone. “I just want to be with you,” he said.

“So every Sunday it was just my Dad and me in the kitchen. We listened to Argentinean music and cooked. If I needed a spoon, he would already be handing one to me. I didn’t even have to ask for it. I made this conscious decision to hug him and say ‘I love you and thank you’ every single day. And I would just go up to him at some point, put my arms around him, and press my ear on his chest so I can hear his heart beating.”

One afternoon mid-summer, shortly after Raul and Hector had been granted permission to return to Argentina, Jezebel asked her father. “What am I going to do when you're gone?” He answered simply in Spanish, “Seguir adelante” (“Keep on going.”).

“We both teared up and kind of stood slightly back from each other. In that moment, I knew that it wasn’t just an answer for that moment. It was an answer for life.”

ETCETERAS for Jezabel Careaga

The Questionnaire

• What’s your favorite curse word at work? “The F-word.”

• Besides cooking, what turns you on creatively? “Designing furniture.”

• Word you like the best? “Joy”

• Word you like the least? “Perfection”

• If you were reincarnated as a plant or animal, what would it be? “A lioness.”

• Who would you like to see put on a new banknote? “Barrack Obama.”

• What other work would you like to do? “Psychology.”

• What is your greatest weakness? “Sometimes I love too hard. I can’t go halfway.”

• Do you have a motto of your own, or one you like? “The sun is going to rise and the sun is going to set every single day. Whatever you do in between is all you got.”

• If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates? “Welcome home, baby!”

• Anything else you’d like to tell us? “Life is what we make out of it. Work is in every single detail. There is a saying: ‘How you do anything is how you do everything.’ That’s true.”

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Outtakes from Jezabel on food, work, family, and her life

“We have to do something, right, to have a meaningful life. Day in and day out. So I have work. For me, working is just the way that I live my life. I live my life through food, and in the meantime making money with it. I also make sure that there are people, good people, with me along the way.”

“The story we tell ourselves shapes the way we go through life.”

“Someday I will have a place that is called Room 830.”

“Food is this thing that we all have in common. That you will have a conversation about and you will just open up, recall a memory….Food is such a beautiful thing.”

“Everybody in my house, we all cook. We all have our own style. From my Mom, I learned how to make pasta. We are extremely connected to food. That’s how we express love. That’s how we connect with people.”

“Work gives you so much dignity as a human being. It gives you freedom. It gives you a sense of fulfillment that is just for you. It’s not for someone else.”

“When I was little, I used to go with my dad to the local woodshop. I always grabbed a little bit of sawdust and put it in my pocket.”

“I call myself the chosen one. This is not to say I’m so special. I think I was just really lucky. I’m the oldest. When my parents were both working, my grandmother took care of me alone….Having this nurturing, caring, full-of-possibilities space translates fast forward to where I am now.”

“At 16 years old, my Dad started at the steel mill on the factory floor. Thirty-plus years later, he was running the company….I remember sometimes that people would show up at the door to our house and ask him for work. I always remembered that.”

Afterward

“Here we are in April 2022, not getting through or surviving, but actually thriving. I have reconnected with my business, my community, my team, and my customers.” Beyond running Jezabel’s in Spruce Hill, she has expanded into designing furniture and other crafts. More recently, acclaimed chef Jose Garces @chefjosegarces selected her to be chef-in-residence at his restaurant Volvér as part of a program to showcase up-and-coming talents of the Philadelphia foodie scene. To learn more about her, go to jezabelscafe.com or follow her on Instagram @jezabelcareaga.

Jezabel’s Recipe for Pastelera

Pastelera is a basic, sweet egg custard generally used for vigilantes, facturas, or just to eat it by the spoonful.

Ingredients

• 500 grams (or roughly 2 cups) of milk - whole preferred

• 120 grams (1/3 of a cup) of granulated sugar

• 35 grams ((2 level tablespoons) of all purpose flour

• 35 grams (2 level tablespoons) of cornstarch

• 3 eggs

• 1 egg yolk

• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Instructions

Start by heating the milk in a medium-large sauce pan until warm and then add half of the sugar. Stir. Please make sure milk does not boil.

In a bowl mix the other half of the sugar with flour and cornstarch. Add the eggs and egg yolk. Once this is well integrated, slowly pour half of the warmed milk over the egg mixture. Whisk while pouring the milk, tempering the eggs.

Empty the bowl with the eggs/milk into the saucepan. Cook under heat until thickened, whisking constantly. Please avoid any browning or burning on the bottom of the sauce pan by being sure that one whisks the entire pan bottom. Brown bits in the custard is undesirable.

When there is no remaining foam and the custard is smooth and shiny, it is ready. Remove from the heat and add the vanilla. Incorporate well, whisking to make sure that the custard has no lumps.

Pour into a bowl. Cover the top of the custard with plastic wrap (make sure there is no air between custard and plastic wrap). Cool in the refrigerator, and the pastelera is ready to devour. Enjoy!