David Ansill, a noted French chef in Philadelphia, has died at 65

In his three-decade tour through some of Philadelphia’s groundbreaking restaurants, chef David Ansill cooked it all — burgers to escargots, cheeseburger quesadillas to pigs’ feet, cheesesteak spring rolls to multi-course cannabis-infused tasting menus.

But not chicken fingers. Those, he would not cook.

Mr. Ansill, 65, who lived in South Philadelphia, died Monday in hospice care of complications from lymphoma. He had been diagnosed in spring 2023 and announced his illness last summer.

Wiry, with dreads and a pointy goatee, Mr. Ansill cut a striking figure in the city’s kitchens. Friends and relatives — including his wife of 25 years, Cathy Gilbert-Ansill, and their daughter, Ambre — spent the weekend at his bedside. After his passing, they recalled his humanity, athleticism, and his love of Earl Grey tea, as well as his kitchen skills — in particular, his paella, ossobuco, and soups.

He also was an animal lover, with four cats and a pet Jackson’s chameleon named Ivan Horn, who died two days before he did.

“He fought till the end,” said his daughter, who arrived Saturday from France and felt him squeeze her hand.

Mr. Ansill, who grew up in Cheltenham, got a job at age 18 in 1976 as a bar-back at the South Street cabaret Grendel’s Lair. The everything-goes atmosphere cinched him on the restaurant industry. He moved on to Copabanana, another colorful joint on South Street, and then the Restaurant School, now Walnut Hill College, in the 1980s, before heading to Spain to cook. Back home in 1991, he became chef at Serrano in Old City, offering regional Spanish dinners every Monday. From there, he worked at such disparate spots as the Bank (a nightclub), Treetops at the Rittenhouse Hotel (the posh predecessor of Lacroix), and Judy’s Cafe in Queen Village (a comfort-food specialist).

Mr. Ansill’s next stop was Miami, before he returned to Philadelphia in the late 1990s for a short-lived sous chef’s job at the Continental in Old City. In 2000, he decamped to the new Lucy’s Hat Shop, a nightclub-slash-restaurant across Market Street, where owner Avram Hornik asked him to put chicken fingers on the bar menu.

“He responded, ‘Sure. All middle fingers,’” Hornik said Monday. “Needless to stay, no chicken fingers were added to the menu.”

At Lucy’s, Mr. Ansill began tinkering with French peasant bistro food, offering such dishes as grilled quail served with red grapes roasted in a port wine sauce and grilled spinach — literally a bold game in a roast-chicken town. (Gilbert-Ansill is from Alsace-Lorraine; she was the pastry chef for her husband’s restaurants.)

One day in 2001, Mr. Ansill was riding his bike to Lucy’s when he spotted a for-rent sign on a shuttered Vietnamese noodle house on Eighth Street near Washington Avenue. That July, he and his wife opened Pif, a French BYOB bistro, named after Ambre’s teddy bear. Ambre, who still owns the toy, said she had considering bringing it to the hospital while her father was in hospice care.

The 36-seat Pif was Mr. Ansill’s tour de force. He’d scour the nearby Italian Market for that night’s blackboard menu. Dishes like escargots served in heads of garlic in Pernod sauce and topped with chopped hazelnut; steak tartare with purple mustard, cognac, and fried capers; and stuffed pigs’ feet became part of the city’s fine-dining canon.

In early 2006, Mr. Ansill returned to the former site of Judy’s Cafe, at Third and Bainbridge Streets, to open a second restaurant, Ansill Food & Wine, a then-edgy concept of European-style small plates — “snacks and wines for food-conscious adults,” as he called it. Soon after, he closed Pif, which later opened as Bibou and is now Paffuto.

After Ansill closed in 2009 (it’s now Cry Baby), Mr. Ansill revamped the menu at Ladder 15, the Rittenhouse party bar, where he stayed for two years, offering high-end pub food, such as pork belly Korean tacos.

From there, he became more itinerant. 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, whose owner, Owen Kamihira, had worked with Mr. Ansill at Copabanana. “Some of the greatest times I can think of was watching David play soccer,” Kamihira said.

After racking up good notices at Bar Ferdinand, his next stops were the Good King Tavern in Bella Vista and a consultant’s role at Pinefish, a now-closed seafood restaurant in Washington Square West.

In 2017, Mr. Ansill got into cannabis-infused cooking, hosting pop-up dinners featuring such dishes as marijuana-infused chile oil on salmon tartare and bone marrow whipped with ganja butter, spread on crostini in a bowl of truffle mushroom soup. “Ansill was able to weave [the cannabis] into his dishes deftly, like any other flavorful ingredient,” wrote Danya Henninger for Billy Penn.

Aila DeVowe, who had been working with Mr. Ansill in recent years, called him “one of the few people that you work with, you don’t necessarily work for. So generous with his time with his teaching — not just with me but with everybody.”

A GoFundMe campaign to help defray medical expenses is still active. Besides his wife and daughter, Mr. Ansill is survived by a brother, Jay Ansill, and a sister, Bethellen Ansill Keefe.

There will be no service; a memorial dinner will be held at a later date “with all good food — more like a party or a celebration of his life, rather than something dark,” his wife said.