David Ansill, the chef behind such groundbreaking Philadelphia restaurants as Pif and Ansill, is going through chemotherapy for lymphoma, diagnosed several months ago.to help with expenses, with a goal of raising $50,000. Right now, he said, he gets physical and occupational therapy, though he said the chemo had left him mostly confined to a hospital bed on the first floor of his South Philadelphia house. His wife, Catherine, and daughter, Ambre, are helping to care for him.
In recent years, Ansill has been creating cannabis-infused dinners around town with his longtime sous chef Aila DeVowe, asIn April, Ansill noticed neck pain and thought it was a pulled muscle or strain. “It just kept getting more painful,” he said. During a trip to an emergency room, images showed a lesion on his spine. Later tests showed that it was cancer that had spread, he said.Chemotherapy has been rough, he said, because it led to neuropathy on his hands, legs, and feet.
Ansill, who grew up in Cheltenham, rose through the scene at assorted restaurants such as Judy’s Cafe, The Continental, and Lucy’s Hat Shop. In 2001, he was riding his bike to work when he spotted a for-rent sign on a onetime Vietnamese noodle house on Eighth Street near Washington Avenue in South Philadelphia. He opened Pif, a French BYOB bistro, named after Ambre’s teddy bear.
In early 2006, Ansill returned to the former site of Judy’s Cafe at Third and Bainbridge Streets to open Ansill Food & Wine, an edgy bar-restaurant specializing in European-style small plates — “snacks and wines for food-conscious adults,” as he called it. Soon after, in 2007, he closed Pif .