City of Boston sues chef Barbara Lynch for $1.7 million in unpaid taxes – The Boston Globe

In the wake of last month’s announcement that she would close and sell her remaining restaurants, chef Barbara Lynch is now being sued by the City of Boston for nearly $1.7 million in unpaid personal property taxes.

According to a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Suffolk Superior Court, the celebrated-but-embattled chef has tallied up a “vast unpaid amount of taxes” across her seven restaurants in Fort Point, the South End, and Beacon Hill that have gone unaddressed for over a decade.

The lawsuit claims that Lynch owes $589,430 in back taxes at No. 9 Park and $156,188 at B&G Oysters that date back to 2011; $515,107 at Menton and $134,714 at Drink that have gone unpaid since 2015; $148,269 at the Butcher Shop unpaid since 2013; $124,995 at Sportello that date back to 2012; and $8,003 in taxes at Stir that have accrued since 2017.

“With the exception of one tax payment for each entity in August 2021,” the suit alleges that Lynch continuously failed to pay personal property taxes, which are assessed on equipment, fixtures, and other business material. Those taxes continue to grow at a rate of $366.94 a day. The city sent final notices to the chef’s seven restaurants in January of this year; in the ensuing months, several of Lynch’s restaurants have accrued over $20,000 more in back taxes.

Lynch, a daughter of South Boston whose trajectory from public housing to the upper echelons of fine dining put her among an elite class of celebrity chefs, has, over the past several years, faced a series of debilitating hardships that have upended her career and her hometown restaurant empire.

In March of 2023, two former employees brought a class-action lawsuit against the James Beard Award-winning chef, claiming she failed to pay out tips to staff after her eateries reopened from pandemic-era closures. Like many restaurants, Lynch’s group applied for federal Paycheck Protection Plan loans to help keep the business afloat in 2020, with South End seafood spot B&G Oysters receiving about $888,974 in PPP loans and Lynch’s Fort Point cocktail bar Drink receiving over $1.3 million, according to the lawsuit, which is still pending.

A month later, over a dozen former employees came forward with reports of longstanding problems in Lynch’s kitchens, reporting that the chef’s inappropriate behaviors and hostile actions had resulted in a toxic workplace culture. Lynch, herself a sexual assault survivor who has written in her memoir about her past troubles with alcohol, denied the allegations, calling them “fantastical.”

“I expressly reject the various false accusations lodged against me that I have behaved inappropriately with employees or crossed professional guideposts that are important to me,” she said in a statement at the time. “I cannot put out all the fires that flare in this high stress environment and my very modest roots allow me to recognize that I’m far from being above reproach.”

But all the controversies took a toll. In the ensuing months, Lynch pulled back from her Boston restaurants, and by September, The Butcher Shop in the South End had gone dark.

In January of this year, Lynch announced that she would close her three Fort Point restaurants — Menton, Sportello, and Drink — and sell The Butcher Shop and Stir to former employees, a move that resulted in the firing of 100 workers. At the time, she said she intended to focus her efforts on running her newest endeavor, The Rudder, a waterfront seafood restaurant in Gloucester, where she lived upstairs.

Six days later, the city filed its final notices to the chef for unpaid taxes.

Then, last month, Lynch shared in an Instagram post that she would be closing The Rudder. By the day’s end, she announced that her remaining Boston restaurants, No. 9 Park and B&G Oysters, would also shutter. In an announcement she released regarding the closures, Lynch said the financial challenges of running restaurants contributed to her decision.

“The harsh realities of the global pandemic and the many difficulties faced calls for significant investment, which neither myself nor my fellow shareholders are positioned to do,” Lynch wrote. “We are working hard to finalize sales that will ensure those much loved entities will carry on in some small way.”

In the court filing, the city requested to file a temporary restraining order against Lynch to preserve assets, ensuring that should a sale of the restaurants go through, any back taxes would be paid.

A representative for Lynch did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday evening.

Sean Cotter of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.

Read the full text of the lawsuit below.

Janelle Nanos can be reached at janelle.nanos@globe.com. Follow her @janellenanos.