Philly chef David Ansill creates GoFundMe to help with his cancer fight

David Ansill, the chef behind such groundbreaking Philadelphia restaurants as Pif and Ansill, is going through chemotherapy for lymphoma, diagnosed several months ago.

Ansill, 64, and family have created a GoFundMe campaign 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, as Squirly.net.

In 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 (which later became Bibou).

After Ansill closed in 2009 (it’s now Cry Baby), Ansill revamped the menu at Ladder 15, the Rittenhouse party bar. From there, he spent six months in Jamaica before returning to Philadelphia in 2012 to take the chef’s job at Bar Ferdinand, then a Spanish bar-restaurant in Northern Liberties. Its owner, Owen Kamihira, and Ansill had worked together at Copabanana on South Street in the 1980s. Good notices followed.

Next up were stops at the Good King Tavern in Bella Vista and consulting at Pinefish, a now-closed seafood restaurant in Washington Square West.

For now, DeVowe is continuing with the cannabis pop-ups. “Hopefully I’ll be healthy enough to show up at some of them and the private ones that I was doing,” Ansill said.