Lydia Shire

Vocation

Family

American chef and restaurateur, she owns Locke-Ober's, a venerable Boston restaurant, as well as "Biba" and others. She always enjoyed cooking and landed a job as a salad makr in one of Boston's oldest and finest restaurants of the time, Maison Robert. She liked it so much that she went on to attend the Cordon Bleu Cooking School in London after which she returned to the restaurant as a line cook. With positions of increasing importance and acclaim to her credit, she opened Seasons restaurant at the exclusive Bostonian Hotel in 1982. Her reputation spread and in 1986 she was asked by the Four Seasons Hotel group to open a restaurant in Beverly Hills, the first woman the fashionable group had appointed to position of Executive Chef at one of their luxury properties. Missing Boston, she returned to open Biba ("Back in Boston Again"), a restaurant which earned praise for its innovative and daring menus. In 1994 she opened Pignoli and in 2001 she took over the Boston institution of Locke-Ober's, sweetly ironic in that the restaurant had prohibited women from entering its dining room for 97 years. Since then she has opened other restaurants as well. Often named on the "best" list of cooking magazines, Shire has received several awards including Best Chef from the James Beard Foundation. Shire has three grown children from her first marriage. She and her second husband, Uriel de Jesus Pineda (b. April 4, 1944 in Medellin, Colombia according to their son's birth certificate) have a son Alex, born in 1990 when Shire was 41.