Boston chef is a stirring story
Share with others:
Barbara Lynch, who grew up in a South Boston housing project, is probably nobody's idea of someone most likely to succeed in the food world.
"Everything we ate came out of a box, jar or can," she writes in her first cookbook, "Stir," published late last year. That's no slight to her mother, who already had plenty on her plate, working several jobs after her young husband died of a heart attack a month before Barbara, the youngest of their six kids, was born.
But children, eager little sponges that they are, absorb other influences. Ms. Lynch's awakening came during high school, where she took a home economics class and "got hooked on the sense of wonder and accomplishment" she felt after making something delicious. One of her three jobs then was at a private club that served French food; she also had a friend with an Italian mother who kept pots of basil, parsley and rosemary on her apartment steps.
After high school, Ms. Lynch escaped her storage company secretarial job and got herself hired as an assistant cook on a dinner cruise ship. She worked her way through restaurant kitchens, studying cookbooks by day. On a small farm in Tuscany she learned Italian cooking at the source, as well as the value of seasonal cuisine and local ingredients. Back in Boston, she took over the kitchen of Galleria Italiana, where she attracted national attention and met her future husband, businessman Charlie Petri, who came to the back door hoping to sell her fish from his frozen food storage facility. She already was buying fresh from the local fishermen, but, "Somehow we managed to get married."
Together they ate their way through France, a Michelin-star "marathon of phenomenal food and discovery."
By the time she opened No. 9 Park in 1998 in a townhouse near the Massachusetts state house on Beacon Hill, her food point of view had been honed: "Italian inspired, French influenced, with a heavy Boston accent from our native ingredients -- lobster, clams, scallops, and local fruits and vegetables."
First Published May 20, 2010 12:00 am
