Among the country’s culinary capitals, Boston stands out for the high number of women it can claim as top chefs. The reason for this can be traced, at least in part, to what you might call the Julia Child Effect: The woman who taught Americans — not least female Americans — to master the art of French cooking at home, made her own home in the Boston area. She and her husband moved to neighboring Cambridge in 1961, after returning to the States from their years in Europe, and Child went on to serve as something of a model for women in the city who found themselves drawn to cooking professionally.
Child became great friends with Lydia Shire, the now 71-year-old grand mamma of the cadre of female star chefs who focus on Italian cuisine in the city today. And Shire went on to inspire women who’ve found their calling, not to mention fame, in the kitchens of the restaurants they head up.
“Visibility and visibility on a large stage are really important,” says two-time Top Chef competitor Karen Akunowicz, a Best Chef: Northeast James Beard Award winner and a semifinalist this year for her year-old Italian enoteca, Fox & the Knife. “I believe strongly that if you can see it, you can be it,” she continues, noting that seeing Shire, and those that followed, very much inspired her.
Read on to learn more about Shire, Akunowicz and three more of the top women in Boston turning out top-shelf Italian food.
Lydia Shire
An art school-trained wife and mother who took to professional cooking — something that had been a lifelong avocation — after her divorce, Shire is Boston’s reigning culinary regina. She attended Le Cordon Bleu in London and rose through the ranks in the kitchens of some of Boston’s finest restaurants, collaborated with Jasper White and sojourned to Los Angeles for a stint with Four Seasons before opening her first solo project, BIBA, in Boston in 1989. Since then, she’s been honored again and again, by the James Beard Foundation and many others. Her current restaurant, the Italian-inspired Mediterranean spot Scampo, in the Liberty Hotel, has been going strong for 12 years.
Lydia Shire (ph Carmichael Rosenberg)
Jody Adams
Adams shocked the Boston area in 2016 when she announced she would step down as the chef at Rialto, a 22-year-old favorite for fantastic classic Italian (which ended up closing completely with her departure). But her fans didn’t have to despair; just months later, she opened Porto, in the city’s Back Bay neighborhood. Here, she creates stellar Mediterranean fair, much of it with a decidedly Italian bent. Thanks to a suggestion from Julia Child, who Adams had the good fortune to meet when she was just starting out, the chef earned her culinary chops working for Lydia Shire. A winner of multiple James Beard Awards, she was inducted into the James Beard Foundation’s Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America in 2018, and her work fighting hunger has been honored by Share our Strength.
Jody Adams (ph Ken Rivard)
Barbara Lynch
A multi-time James Beard Award winner and another member of the Foundation’s Who’s Who, Lynch has also been recognized as one of Time magazine’s most influential people in the world. She’s been working in kitchens since her early teens, but it was experience in her 20s in the Mediterranean restaurants of Todd English that piqued her interest in Italy. This led her on a trip to the country, where she learned culinary traditions from the local women who knew them best. Now, her empire includes seven venues. Among these, the casual, trattoria-inspired Sportello is the most specifically Italian, but several others feature elements of the country’s cuisine, both authentic and reimagined.
Barbara Lynch (ph Michael Prince)
Karen Akunowicz
Although she made her name with, and won her James Beard Award for her food at Myers + Chang — a mecca of pan-Asian eating in Boston’s South End — she’s making headlines these days for the pan-Italian prowess she displays at her first solo project, Fox & the Knife. At this female-focused enoteca nearly the entire staff is made up of women, and there’s a serious focus on wines from female vintners. The restaurant — which is in the running for a James Beard Best New Restaurant award — represents something of a return to Italy for Akunowicz. Prior to Myers + Chang, she spent a year working as a chef in Modena, and she cooked at Michael Schlow’s now-shuttered rustic Italian Via Matta, in Boston, before that. (Click here for the interview.)
Karen Akunowicz (ph Kate Grewal)
Tiffani Faison
After earning raves for her barbecue and Southeast Asian restaurants (Sweet Cheeks and Tiger Mama respectively), the twice-James-Beard-Award-nominated Faison is currently on a bit of an Italian tear. Her old-school Orfano, which debuted in August, celebrates the often-overlooked role women have played in Italian fine dining. As she told LCI in the fall, she wanted the eatery to “flip the script” and answer the question, “What if the women were the gangster and the women were the chefs?” (She’s a James Beard semifinalist this year for the restaurant.) Now, Faison — who was the runner up on the very first season of Top Chef and has made myriad TV appearances since then — is about to open the much-anticipated Tenderoni’s, a classic pizza and grinder shop in High Street Place, Boston’s spring-launching food hall.
Tiffani Faison (ph Mike Diskin)
nota bene: Due to coronavirus emergency, restaurants in Massachusetts are only doing take-out and delivery until April 6. Stay safe!