Barbara Lynch has closed most of her restaurants in Boston
Boston chef Barbara Lynch, who was accused by more than two dozen employees of multiple forms of workplace abuse in a New York Times report last year, announced Friday that most of her restaurants had closed by the end of 2023.
These include its fine-dining restaurant Menton, one of the city’s most prestigious destinations since it opened in 2010, and two others in the same building in the Fort Point district: the stylish trattoria Sportello and the sophisticated cocktail bar Drink. The Butcher Shop and Stir, both in South End, have also closed.
No. 9 park, the Beacon Hill institution on which her empire was built will continue to exist, and so will the fish bar B&G Oysters and Ms. Lynch’s latest project, the ruddera seasonal restaurant on the waterfront in nearby Gloucester, which opened in June after a two-year delay.
About 100 employees have lost their jobs, according to a company statement. Barbara Lynch Collective. In a Zoom call on Friday, the company’s new Chief Operating Officer, Lorraine Tomlinson-Hall, who was hired after the Times report was published, called the remaining restaurants “great” and expressed hope for expansion on the North Shore, where Mrs. Lynch lives.
In the statement, Ms. Lynch attributed the closures to “post-pandemic realities,” financial mismanagement by her former employees and “an uncooperative landlord.”
Acadia Real Estate Trusta New York-based investment firm, owns the Fort Point building, one of the neighborhood’s first luxury developments: with Ms. Lynch’s three street-level restaurants, it helped usher in gentrification in the long-neglected area of South Boston , where she grew up.
“Boston is no longer the same place where I opened seven restaurants over the past 25 years,” she wrote. “Properties have been flipped and flipped and landlords just want the rents that only national chains can sustain.” Acadia Realty did not immediately respond to calls seeking comment.
Ms. Lynch’s statement made no mention of the long-term problems caused by her alcohol abuse and verbal and physical aggression against employees, which led to high employee turnover and was an open secret among Boston’s hospitality workers.
After a long, hard climb to the top from her troubled childhood in South Boston, the past few years have been a long, hard fall for Ms. Lynch, one of the most famous women in American cooking, and since then a leading chef in New England. the nineties.
At the height of her success, around 2017, she received numerous culinary awards, a best-selling memoir, and a spot on Time Magazine’s annual list of most influential people.