Shire Takes Her Eclectic Taste to Boston

It’s after midnight, and Lydia Shire is leaning on her elbow, nursing a drink and listening to old friends and new customers try to talk her out of putting two TV sets in the bar of her just opened Boston restaurant called Biba.

Two years ago, Shire was in Los Angeles and TV sets were the least of her worries. As executive chef at the then-brand-new Four Seasons Hotel (indeed, she was the first woman executive chef in American hotel history) Shire had an enormous reputation to live up to. She was known as one of the finest young chefs in America, and her hometown of Boston was crushed when Shire left for the West Coast.

The hotel opened with a splash, but Shire’s multicultural, experimental cooking was at odds with both the restaurant’s budget and vision. Shire left the restaurant at the Four Seasons only a few months after she opened it . . . and after her cooking earned the place several glowing reviews.

This time around, Shire has had her own way in almost everything. Named Biba, after the hip Deco department store that opened in London in the early ‘70s, new her project is set among designer boutiques in downtown Boston, around the corner from the Ritz and across the street from Boston Common.

The upstairs dining room is done in tones of gold and terra cotta trimmed in natural wood. And brightly colored designs accent the ceiling, rugs and upholstered banquettes. “I didn’t want any black in the restaurant,” Shire says.

The menu is Shire’s own particular eclectic blend of traditional American regional cuisine and New England seafood, with accents of Italy, California and Asia. The menu is divided into food categories: meat, starch, “legumina” (vegetables), offal (two different preparations of calves brains; lamb tongue with fava beans) and fish. You are meant to select whatever strikes your fancy, to be served in whatever sequence and combination you prefer.

Besides the regular dinner menu, Shire put together a bar menu. That way, patrons who aren’t in the mood for a formal dinner menu can enjoy a light supper or snack . . . conceivably even while watching a football game on an overhead television.

Which brings us back to Shire, sitting at the bar, still arguing for those two TV sets. “I’ve always wanted two,” the chef/football fanatic is saying, “so I can watch two games at once.”