This month’s Boston Magazine contains an epic profile of Barbara Lynch and its chock-full of facts you probably didn’t know about Boston’s busiest chef. Below, a sampling of our very favorites.
She was a child chain smoker: “Lynch largely reared herself. She says she started smoking cigarettes at age seven (“Winchesters. Ten a day”).”
She has two middle fingers and she knows how to use them: “[Fellow boxer Norton] accused her of spraying fake sweat on herself to make it look like she was working hard; he told her she couldn’t stay on her feet in the ring. “That’s why we call her canvas-back,” he said. “What’s that, muffin-top?” Lynch said, giving him the finger. … “We also call her A.T.,” he said, as in “All Talk.” Lynch was on her back now, about to do leg lifts. From the mat, she flipped him a double bird.”
Fellow chefs should watch their table settings: “Lynch pulled a grubby, crumpled cloth napkin from a cardboard box and laid it out for comparison. “This is from Eric Ripert’s restaurant in DC, Westend,” she said. She had been in Washington the week before, for a conference, and had eaten at the famed Le Bernardin chef’s bistro in the Ritz-Carlton. “I took it,” she said of the napkin, with an only mildly sheepish laugh. “I wanted to compare the sizes.”
Her first brush with Julia Child was not quite auspicious: “When she was 15, she looked up Julia Child in the phone book and called her home in Cambridge; when Child answered, she hung up.”
Her next project could be on the water: Says friend Kerry Foley: “We used to ride our bikes to the Milk Bottle over near the Children’s Museum. She’d say, ‘I’m going to have a floating restaurant, right here.’ Now I tell her, ‘You’ve done everything but that one.’”
Todd English made her cry: Cooking with English was a high-pressure job, and Lynch often could be found crying in the walk-in freezer. Discovering her there once, English grabbed her, lifted her off the ground, and carried her to her position on the line, saying, “You have got to get your shit together. You have got to get organized.”
She is hardcore: “Copps remembers the time Lynch had a bicycle accident—she had two black eyes, and stitches on her face—and took only two days off from work; and when she drew jury duty while working at Olives, she never missed a single shift.”
Barbara Lynch: Food Fighter [Boston]
