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Food

How Boston Legend Barbara Lynch Got Her Flagship Restaurant Off The Ground

"This wasn’t like bullshitting a cruise-ship captain to get a job. It was much more intimate." An excerpt from her just-released memoir 'Out of Line: A Life Playing With Fire.'
Image courtesy Michael Prince

Amazingly, there were investors willing to gamble on my dream. I remember meeting the first one face-to-face. I was so anxious that I practically dissociated from my body, circling it like a soul in a near-death experience. Hard as I tried, I couldn't work up my usual fuck it, I'll figure it out attitude. This wasn't like bullshitting a cruise-ship captain to get a job. It was much more intimate, exposing my heart—my deepest, most private vision of my own future—to a judge who would decide if it was worthy.

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The day was wet and snowy. The investor met us in a coffee shop, wearing a baseball cap and soggy rubber boots over his shoes. I tried not to stare as he took off the cap and shrugged off his trench coat, which wasn't fancy, like Louis Boston, but just normal and good-looking. He shook hands with Charlie, who stood beside me, and then with the management guy who'd helped us refine the business plan. Then, finally, he turned to me. "Miss Lynch," he said, in such a gentle, humble voice. "I'm very glad to meet you."

He took my hand with a grip so sincere and expressive that I almost cried. Even now, recalling that moment, I tear up.

Instead of being what I expected—critical and arrogant—he was so kind and open that I wanted to blurt out everything: how I grew up in the projects, fucked up academically, started cooking in home ec class, dropped out of high school, and had zero formal culinary training—

and yet, I was determined to open a restaurant on the hill, meaning Beacon Hill, the most aristocratic part of town, that would be elegant but welcoming, with informed, intuitive service and sophisticated food, not the big bowls of pasta I became known for at Galleria, but food created from my personal palette of Italian and French influences, the French accents coming not from any hands-on experience but from close study of my large collection of cookbooks by Alain Ducasse and other masters, some not translated, which I understood with the help of a dictionary and, mainly, the pictures; a restaurant that would be different from any in Boston…

I didn't spew out this whole torrent, but must have presented it convincingly, along with the business plan, because on Christmas Eve, 1997, my investor called with an amazing gift. "I'm in for six figures," he said. "People are gone for the holidays now, but I have a couple friends who might also be interested."

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"Wow… wow," was all I could choke out. Then, "My God, thank you, thank you so much." My whole life I'd had to fight—to teach myself, to achieve, to prove what I could do, to overcome a million doubts and fears, including my own. Now, someone had given my skills and accomplishments a definite value, in dollars. That degree of respect stunned me, touching me at a level deeper than any glowing review or award. It granted me a professional stature that I had hardly dared to envision for myself.

Excerpted from Out of Line: A Life Playing With Fire, by Barbara Lynch (Atria Books). Copyright © 2017