Two Classes Divided by a Kitchen Door BOSTON - Not far from where Barbara Lynch is standing is an electric door. Through it, you leave this kitchen of tattoos and beer for a room of Riesling and pearls. The waiters repeatedly line up at the door, shivering with nerves like children in a play; then a button is pressed and the electric door opens and they're off, totally poised, even a little superior, to deliver your dish or clarify whether your allergy extends to truffle dust. That electric door, in an upscale Boston restaurant called Menton, stands atop an increasingly forbidding border of class in American life. Restaurants like these are among those spaces where America's educated elite and the working class still mingle night after night in dimly lit intimacy, feigning through pleases and thank yous that they share a way of life. Ms. Lynch - the chef and owner of Menton and several other high-end restaurants, and the grande dame of Boston's foodscape - still wonders what allowed her to walk through fate's electric door. Maybe, she half-jests, it was that blood transfusion she had as a girl, lifting her while leaving her siblings to the usual South Boston fates: police officer, trucker, recovering addict. Maybe it was walking as a teenager into the St. Botolph Club, a prestigious society that John Quincy Adams once ran, to work alongside her mother, and realizing that "not everybody is Irish and working at the Post Office, construction or down on the docks or phone company or Gillette," as she put it, referring to the Boston-based maker of razors. Ms. Lynch is an American mobility story in times when they're getting harder to pull off. A spry 47-year-old with short black hair and an intense gaze, she grew up in the Mary Ellen McCormack public housing project in South Boston, more commonly known as Southie - a heavily Irish, down-on-its-luck peninsular swath of the city. Her father, a taxi driver, died of a heart attack just before she was born. She started smoking at age 7. By middle school, she had begun her first business: a one-woman gambling enterprise in which she would place bets on horses for her schoolteachers and often pocket the money. The idea of cooking came to Ms. Lynch, she says, from a stir-fry recipe in a Good Housekeeping magazine. She was 12 or so, and remembers marveling at the possibility of following a few written rules and ending up with a meal from another continent. As she grew, she hustled to find cooking jobs. A hastily told lie turned her into a chef on a dinner cruise ship docked on Martha's Vineyard, an affluent island off Massachusetts. Talent and fortune carried her to jobs with the well-known Boston chef Todd English, and at last to restaurants of her own. Today her empire spans an oyster bar, a speakeasy cocktail lounge, a butcher shop, a cookbook store, an Italian diner, an upscale American saloon and other things. But she claims to be done with fancy restaurants. She savors her come-from-behind victory, but now she finds herself longing to make such victories less rare. She wants to attack the obesity and ill health that plague the people she grew up with, and so she is creating a new company that is, among other things, experimenting with ways to create affordable, healthy, ready-to-eat meals. To do her bit to restore the manufacturing jobs that fled Southie, she hopes to locate the factory for her new company there. But these are small interventions. Ms. Lynch will tell you that this is becoming a harder country in which to twist your fate. Consider her line cooks. She pays them $10 to $12 an hour, what she says she can afford. That buys them less than did the $6 an hour she was making doing the same job 25 years ago. This is America's economic reality writ small: as Ms. Lynch has thrived and Boston has become a more worldly and expensive place to eat, it has become a worse place to cook - unless you own the place. On this particular evening, Ms. Lynch was cooking with a world-famous chef - Daniel Humm, of Eleven Madison Park in New York, who was in town to promote a book. But the company that most excited Ms. Lynch was that of a precocious 13-year-old boy whom she called her apprentice. As the line cooks toiled for their hourly wage, hoping for a flash of recognition from Chef Lynch, she mostly hung around the boy, watching as he chopped, explaining the dishes. He was fortunate, this aspiring chef, to receive this attention. And he was talented. But he was there because his father is one of Ms. Lynch's best customers - a man who runs an investment fund and, according to Ms. Lynch, has private jets and all the rest of it. Basically, the customer brought his kid in, and his kid likes to cook, and so he's got the pre-eminent chef in Boston as his private tutor: the kind of stacked odds that she once knew from the other side. For four hours that night, the kitchen was awhirl. The staff rushed back and forth through the electric door, barking at each other under the white lights of the kitchen, then assuming a different accent, a different posture, an air of restrained quiet every time they crossed the borderline into the beautiful darkness. When it was over, the guests spilled into the street. In the kitchen, the anxieties instantly melted away. A drawer was opened, and chilled cans of Miller High Life beer pulled out. They cracked open the cans and bit into some pizza delivered hours earlier. The nightly pantomime was done, and the relief palpable. Join an online conversation at http://anand.ly; Follow on Twitter.com/anandwrites