Chloe Gould Overcame Kidney Disease to Open a Unique Restaurant in Her Native Bronzeville

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When Chloe Gould left Chicago for college, she had barely been outside Illinois. Now she’s drawing on her time living in Singapore to open a restaurant in her native Bronzeville, fulfilling a teenage dream of owning a restaurant – one that seemed impossible for years because of chronic kidney disease. 

DixiePura Kitchen opens at 325 E. Pershing Rd. on October 18 with Gould’s creative mix of the Southern American food she grew up eating and the Southeast Asian food she discovered in Singapore. 

Take as an example her Ernie’s Fingers, named after the grandmother who first jumpstarted her love of food by assigning a young Gould to chop peppers and onions. Gould adds a curry blend of over 21 spices to braised greens like her grandmother would make, stuffing them and bits of cornbread that also recall her grandmother in an egg roll wrapper that she serves with an “Asian remoulade” for dipping.

“She used to shove food in my mouth. She loves to see people eat,” Gould remembers of her grandmother. “That’s the nostalgia: my grandmother used to feed me cornbread and collard greens.”

Or there’s Gould’s green curry smothered fried chicken, which incorporates coconut milk and curry spices into the classic gravy and onions dish. “We grew up with smothered chicken,” she says. “It’s important to have that familiar dish, but then incorporate the Asian flair.” 

Shrimp and grits, but it’s chili prawns. Chicken and waffles, but it’s Korean fried chicken and hoecakes. (Those two dishes are on the weekend brunch menu.) The pork rib that is simmered in a broth for bak kut teh in Singapore is instead a smoked baby back rib at DixiePura Kitchen. The brothy laksa contains seafood gumbo and rice grits, the latter of which straddle two worlds on their own.  

“I’m creating my own cuisine,” says Gould. “I’m not saying this is a Singapore dish…I’m putting those two together.”

When Gould first realized that being a chef was a career possibility and decided she one day wanted to have a restaurant, at age 15, she could have had no idea that she would eventually be combining American Southern and Southeast Asian cuisines. 

“I didn’t even eat eggs,” she says, when she entered Chicago Public School’s Dunbar Vocational Career Academy for high school and decided to enroll in the culinary arts program because watching family sitcoms had piqued her interest in home economics and raising children. Since the program was crowded, the chef in charge made her cook an egg.

“We wasn’t flipping omelets at home,” she says. Her family “was poor. Nobody had the skill or talked about an omelet.”

But she was accepted into the program and soon won a job at the Hilton at O’Hare Airport on the weekends, earning $5.85 an hour and some intense training. She devoted herself to learning kitchen skills both at school and at the hotel, at one point hiring her family to help cater a 200-person Christmas event for Dunbar. 

After hearing about the respected culinary program at Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island, she set her mind on going there with the immovable determination of a teenager, student loans be damned. (She was classmates with the celebrity chef Eric Adjepong, and has a copy of his Ghanaian cookbook on display in DixiePura Kitchen, as she continues to incorporate African cooking into her own food.) While there, she was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease, and was recommended dialysis as treatment. 

“I looked up what dialysis was, and I said, ‘That’s death,’” she says. “So I ignored it my last year in college. Because all I can think of is how in the hell I’m going to be in the kitchen standing on my feet doing this.’”

Restaurant work is grueling, requiring long hours of standing and exhausting work. Health insurance – now an absolute necessity for Gould – is also rare in restaurant jobs even today. So she eventually found a culinary job that had shorter shifts, was less physically punishing, and offered benefits: teaching young kids like herself at Dunbar. 

During one of the periodic retrenchments common to public school systems, she was laid off, and a friend from college offered her a job teaching in Singapore. She imbibed the cuisine and culture from both students and hawker stands. It was a continuation of her education.

“The Jewels I used to go to as a kid is still located on 35th,” she says. “They probably did have ginger root, but I didn’t know what the hell it was. We knew what garlic cloves were. That’s it.” 

But her kidney disease eventually compelled her to return to Chicago. 

One day, she woke from a dream and drew an early version of the logo for DixiePura Kitchen. She’s been working towards it ever since.

She received a kidney transplant in 2017, and found her birth father the following year, learning that he had also had a kidney transplant; it was genetic. (Chronic hypertension that she attributes to a tendency to always reach for salt as seasoning while growing up didn’t help.) She continued teaching, encouraging her students to explore food outside their neighborhood and forcing them to make everything from scratch to understand jerk marinade’s ingredients and history, for instance. She simultaneously developed recipes and did pop-ups, winning an episode of the Food Network’s Supermarket Stakeout in 2022 and catering for various events and celebrities. 

She was the resident chef at Theaster Gate’s erstwhile Retreat at Currency Exchange Café in Chicago, and now is finally achieving her lifelong dream of opening her own restaurant. “It was always Bronzeville, because this is my neighborhood, this is my community,” she says. She has hired some of her students to work at DixiePura Kitchen, and tries to use her own story to inspire them.

“That's the very message I share with my mentees: never stop pursuing your dreams,” she writes in an email. “They have witnessed this journey from its very beginning, and it means the world to me.”