After working for English, Lynch eventually persuaded an executive from Stride Rite, the shoe company, to invest in her first restaurant. “I owed the I.R.S. $75,000. I lived with my mother. I drove an Isuzu Trooper without a license or insurance. Like, who the [expletive] is going to invest in me, right?” she said. But talent and tenacity made investors confident and she raised the money she needed. The restaurant, No. 9 Park, was an instant success.

It’s tempting to frame Lynch’s rise as a Horatio Alger story, but that doesn’t do justice to her moxie. Since their inception about a quarter-century ago, only 12 percent of the winners of the James Beard award for Outstanding Chef and 16 percent of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs have been women. Lynch has not won Outstanding Chef, but she received the Food & Wine prize in 1996. When she arrived in Aspen to collect her award, an airport driver held a sign with her name, next to another driver holding a sign that said, “Julia Child.” “I made it!” she remembers thinking.

Recently Kish, who is 30, was similarly wowed while cooking next to Daniel Boulud at a fund-raiser for the Barbara Lynch Foundation. But it wasn’t always obvious that she could have a career in the kitchen, either. She modeled throughout high school but disliked it. She was unhappy at college and left after her first year. Her mother suggested she try cooking. She attended Le Cordon Bleu, in Chicago, but found no mentors there. After graduation, she worked in kitchens where she was often the only woman, and the food she was making taught her little about her own style. A disastrous stint as the head chef of a restaurant where her paychecks bounced landed her out of work. Kish, who had done cocaine recreationally, began to rely on it and her use “got a little heavy for four months.” Soon after, she gave it up and started fresh in Boston as a line cook. Eventually she found a job at Stir, where Kish learned quickly under Lynch’s frank and fair direction. “If you ask most people, they’re scared of her,” Kish said of her boss. “Which is a good thing.”

At Stir, Lynch guided Kish as Antolini had taught her, sometimes cooking side by side. When Kish noticed Lynch using a different technique from the one she had chosen — say, searing oiled scallops in a dry pan, rather than dropping dry scallops in an oiled pan — she’d ask why, and they’d discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each method. “She gave me the space to figure out exactly how I cook,” Kish said, “and I would have never found it, because you work with so many chefs who are like: ‘This is how you do it. Don’t do it any other way.’ She was there but not forceful.” One day, Kish received a call from a harried Lynch, asking her to handle the menu for a special “Birds and Burgundy” class that night at Stir. When Lynch arrived later, Kish was in full swing; she’d prepped the meal, demonstrating her mastery of French cooking techniques, from consommé to beurre blanc. What Kish didn’t know was that the demonstration kitchen, where she had to cook in front of people, under time pressure, while teaching, was the perfect preparation for competing on “Top Chef.”

Kish had no interest in being on television, which she feared would play up her looks more than her skills. But Lynch insisted on it. “You have to do this,” she said, after returning from her stint as a guest star the previous season. “You’re young, beautiful and know how to cook. Now own it. The world is your oyster.” She now says she would have dragged her to the set if she continued to refuse. “I knew she could win,” Lynch said.

As Kish recalls it, Lynch’s parting words were: “You’re going to do great. Whatever happens, I’m proud of you.” But it wasn’t lost on Kish that she was representing her mentor; she competed with a note from Lynch in her back pocket. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to do badly, because I don’t want to disappoint her.’ I put a lot of pressure on myself,” she said. She needn’t have worried. On the season finale, Kish was declared the winner before she had the chance to serve dessert. (She was the second woman to win the title.) And when Kish returned to Boston, Lynch soon gave her another prize. She named her chef de cuisine at her Relais & Châteaux property, Menton, giving her free rein over the fine-dining tasting menu.