Chef Jim Burke, 49, who with his wife owned James, a celebrated South Philadelphia restaurant, and later taught in the culinary program at Drexel University before helping to repair another restaurant’s troubled work culture, died Monday after a two-year battle with a rare lung cancer.
Yet he faced cancer with “his customary grace and humility,” said Kristina Burke, whom her husband supported after her diagnosis with breast cancer in September 2019. The couple raised money forKristina Benene and Jim Burke met in 1998 in the kitchen of Venus & the Cowboy, then a buzzworthy restaurant on the Parkway. She was having trouble using fractions to expand a recipe. While up to his elbows in sweet potatoes, he helped her. The equations, like their relationship, worked out.
Mr. Burke, who grew up in Jenkintown, got an economics degree from Franklin and Marshall College but felt more at home in the kitchen. He did not have formal culinary training, “just a lot of dedication and patience,” his wife said. “He worked in a lot of restaurants and read voraciously about cooking.”
The couple traveled to Italy in 2000, working side-by-side for 18 months as chef and pastry chef in a private villa in Tuscany. On their way back to the States, they stopped in Paris, where Mr. Burke proposed. They were married in 2003.
Source: Healthcare Press (healthcarepress.net)
So sad!
Sad. Rest in Peace, Chef.