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 Parkand $156,188 atB&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.
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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.
Menton, a French restaurant in Fort Point owned by Barbara Lynch, closed earlier this year. Matthew J. Lee/Globe Staff
In March of 2023, two former employees brought a class-action lawsuit against the James Beard Award-winning chef, claimingshe 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.”
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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.
The Butcher Shop in the South End.Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff
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.”
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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.
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Janelle Nanos can be reached at janelle.nanos@globe.com. Follow her @janellenanos.
JetBlue will terminate all service to Manchester-Boston Regional Airport in New Hampshire this summer, with the airline’s final flight scheduled for July 8, airport officials said Thursday.
Airport officials said on social media that they were “very disappointed” that the airline will be pulling its service. Manchester-Boston is the largest airport in New Hampshire and sixth largest in New England.
“MHT has worked diligently to promote JetBlue service at MHT, providing air service incentives, a substantial marketing budget, and conducting various promotional activities to create awareness,” officials wrote. “Unfortunately, those efforts were not enough to overcome their ongoing business challenges, which have only been exacerbated by the recent spike in jet fuel prices.”
While JetBlue has long been one of the largest carriers at Logan International Aiport in Boston, some of its routes to Manchester, roughly 50 miles north, have seen lower passenger numbers.
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Aviation publication SimpleFlying reported that the airline’s least popular route last year were flights to Manchester from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, seating just 47 passengers on average.
JetBlue told the airport its decision came as they “make a tough call as to how to best support national connectivity in a time of capacity crisis,” officials said.
The announcement comes just weeks after JetBlue unveiled major route expansion plans in South Florida to fill gate spaces vacated by budget-friendly Spirit Airlines, which ceased its operations in May. A bid from JetBlue to buy Spirit Airlines was blocked in 2024 by the Biden Administration over anti-trust concerns.
JetBlue could not immediately be reached for comment on Friday.
Bryan Hecht can be reached at bryan.hecht@globe.com. Follow him on Instagram @bhechtjournalism.
Mass General nurse-turned-author Karen Winn brings Beacon Hill to life in her latest book. Add this to your beach bag.
“The Society” by Karen Winn. PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE/SLY PHOTOGRAPHY PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE/SLY PHOTOGRAPHY
Massachusetts General Hospital nurse-turned-author Karen Winn often writes in the Boston Athenaeum, watching tours pass by.
One day, in 2023, she joined one. And the seed for her next novel was planted.
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“We passed by an oil portrait of Thomas Handasyd Perkins, a major benefactor to the Athenaeum in the 1800s. The docent alluded to this dark history as to how he’d amassed a large portion of his fortune in the opium trade,” she tells me.
“The tour group moved on — but I was stuck there thinking. I went home and fell down this rabbit-hole of research and learned, to my surprise, just how many of the Boston Brahman families made their fortune in the opium trade. It was fascinating.”
I went down a similar rabbit-hole. The Boston Brahmin opium fortunes are well-documented, including a past Harvard Art Museum exhibit, articles, books and website info including, speaking of Perkins, the Perkins School for the Blind.
Winn, who lives on Beacon Hill and was in a secret society (I asked) added bits and pieces from her own life into the novel-creating mixing bowl: What if there was a secret society built on old opium money in Beacon Hill, and a Mass General nurse was somehow involved?
“The Society” was born.
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If you’re looking for a Boston-set page-turner — an “alternate universe Beacon Hill,” as Winn puts it — to kick off your summer reading, add this suspense to your beach bag.
Nutshell: The Knox, standing proudly on Mount Vernon Street in Beacon Hill, houses meetings of a secret society. Some in Boston believe it’s an elite social club — others believe it hides something sinister.
When Boston antique dealer Vivian Lawrence sees her family fortune vanish, she turns to a family legend that ties her to the Knox, seeking a way into the exclusive secret society.
Taylor Adams, a 20-something Mass General ER nurse who recently moved to Boston, becomes almost obsessed with old-moneyed Vivian, “a creature of wealth,” after Vivian lands in the ER one night. When Vivian disappears from Mass General without a trace, Taylor’s search for answers pulls her into the Knox and its dark history…
What interested me — before I knew anything of Winn’s backstory— was that it felt like it was written by someone who just moved to Boston and was in awe of the city.
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Living here, we might think of Rachel Dratch and Jimmy Fallon and Denise and Sully in those old “Boston Teen” SNL sketches, or Casey Affleck as the “King of Dunkin” as summing us up, at least in terms of how outsiders see us.
But Taylor, the Mass General nurse, almost fetishizes Boston, and old-moneyed New Englanders she imagines walking down every street.
Example: when old-Boston-money Vivian lands in the ER: Taylor “swallows, a flurry of excitement building in her chest… she envisioned that the city would be teeming with these ladies… That she would get to move among their world, learn from them, drink in their fanciness… letting that old New England generational wealth rub off on her until she glimmered with something of its gold dust…It is Boston, after all: the city of cobblestones and beauty, of Harvard and MIT, of sophistication and history.”
Winn, who grew up in New Jersey, moved to Boston 20 years ago after meeting her Boston-native husband Gil at UPenn. They now live in the Beacon Hill area with their two kids and 100-pound (yup) Bernedoodle.
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After two decades here, she’s still “in awe.”
“I grew up in a 5,000-person town in New Jersey. When I came to Boston, I was struck by this beautiful city. Beacon Hill is one of the most historic and charming neighborhoods,” she tells me. “Living here, one might almost be inured to it, but I have this awe. I’m always struck by the cobblestone streets and the gaslit lamps.”
Winn even started a TikTok account for @theknoxsociety, documenting life on Beacon Hill.
This is Winn’s second novel, after 2022’s “Our Little World.” But “I’m not an overnight success by any shape or form,” she says with a laugh.
“I was a nurse and a nurse practitioner, but always loved writing and wrote on the side,” says Winn, who left Mass General in 2010. “It’s a typical writer’s story: I had hundreds of rejections for short stories.”
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One of those rejections — from JFK Jr.’s “George Magazine” in 2000 — actually landed her in Newsweek recently.
I called Winn to talk opium, strange graveyard tour, a terrifying house fire, TikTok, and more.
Taylor arrives in Boston with a burning curiosity about the city. “What is Boston? Who are these people?” questions swimming in her head.
“Absolutely. When I came to Boston, I was so struck by this beautiful city. In my head, I could very clearly see the Knox building: The front is on Mount Vernon Street, and the back, I imagined to look like Branch Street. Branch isn’t the back of Mount Vernon, so I gave it a fictional name.”
I love that level of detail, though. No one outside Boston — or maybe even Beacon Hill— would ever know: oh, Branch Street isn’t in back of Mount Vernon. You have other specific references, like dining at 1928.
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“I almost wish I’d been a little craftier [with adding more]. For instance, at one point I had Taylor get her knives sharpened at Blackstone’s. And it was just too much detail, so I pared it down. But sometimes I’m like, ‘Oh, I wish I kept that!’ [laughs]”
[laughs] That’s how it goes.
I don’t think I realized the effect each reference would have. There are book clubs now that tour Beacon Hill and go to spots mentioned. A few toured the Boston Atheneum, or dined at 1928. I didn’t realize how much people would connect to the sense of place. It feels like it’s been embraced by people in Boston, which is so fun.
Now 1928 has a cocktail named for your book. What are more specific inspirations that went into the novel?
“For the Knox, I took inspiration from The Somerset Club and The ‘Quin — the beautiful room with fireplaces and ornate details.
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“And I was in a secret society in college: Tabard Society at UPenn.”
Wow, what was that like?
“I can’t tell you. [laughs]”
[laughs] Fair enough.
“But I loved that experience. When I was rushing [or trying to get in] you’d find out if you were invited by getting handwritten notes slipped under your door. I tapped into that with The Knox sending notes.”
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You said your husband went with you on midnight strolls through Boston?
“Yes! I dragged him to some graveyard tours. We did one that —it was funny, because I’m not sure how I found it, but it definitely, like, wasn’t very legit.”
[laughs] OK.
“It was just us and this guy — we weren’t allowed inside any of the cemeteries. We’d watch the tours go on the inside, and the three of us would be standing on the outside. [laughs]”
[laughs] Amazing.
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“My husband’s like, ‘Where did you find this guy?’ I don’t know.”
[laughs] This feels like a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode.
“It was quite an experience [laughs] And then, of course, I had to go back. We had to go back and do an official tour.
“And I toured the Nichols House Museum in Beacon Hill, which was neat to see another historic building and learn about family that lived there. I toured the Forbes House Museum in Milton. Forbes family was one of the Brahman families, they made their fortune in the opium trade.
“Also we had lived, at one point in the South End, and actually had a house fire. We were home at the time. Luckily, we were fine. But our house was a total loss.”
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Oh my god.
“We each grabbed a kid and ran out at the door. It was pretty traumatic. Five minutes later, we would not have been able to go out that door. So, I tapped into that when I wrote the fire scene.”
Wow. That’s terrifying.
“As a writer, you store all these things up, and then go into your basket of experiences, and you get to use them.”
You also created a TikTok for the Knox. What sparked that, and how long will you keep that going?
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“I’m having fun with it. I had no expectations when I started. I wasn’t big on TikTok. But having the account for the Knox itself allowed more creative freedom because I wasn’t putting myself out there — I was putting the Knox out there. So I’ve enjoyed creating these videos. Especially since the next novel is brewing in my head.”
What are you working on now?
“My next book focuses on a minor character mentioned in “The Society” — the bookstore owner, Nicholas. I was telling you earlier about those rejections — I actually wrote a short story about him years ago that was never published. It’s been living on my computer and in my head for all these years. I’m ready to tell the story. It will be another very Boston book.”
Catch Karen Winn on July 29 at Quincy’s Next Chapter Books & More.
Lauren Daley is a freelance culture writer. She can be reached at [email protected]. She tweets @laurendaley1, and Instagrams at @laurendaley1. Read more stories on Facebook here.
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Lauren Daley is a longtime culture journalist. As a regular contributor to Boston.com, she interviews A-list musicians, actors, authors and other major artists.
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