Mississippi Muscle
Sure ain't nothing dainty about John Currence's take on Southern food. But that doesn't mean it's low rent. John T. Edge visits the chef who's giving Oxford (Mississippi) a culinary education.
When John Currence, chef/owner of City Grocery on the Courthouse Square in the 19,000-person college town of Oxford, Mississippi, first met Julian Van Winkle, he tried to kiss the Kentucky Bourbon maker on the mouth. Van Winkle saw it coming. He did a stutter step and offered a handshake. Currence, an unabashed fan of 20 year old Pappy Van Winkle Family Reserve, the family's flagship brand, bear-hugged him. They've been friends ever since.
Stolidly built, the 43 year old Currence wears WalMart issue tortoise shell eyeglasses, prefers bandana do-rags to toques, and sports a butcher chart tattoo of a pig on his left forearm. Currence is also Mississippi smart. Meaning he can quote hometown boy William Faulkner's Light in August from memory but also knows how to plumb a bathroom and rebuild a carburetor. He's a hail-fellow-well-met with integrity. A slap-you-on-the-back-and-pour-you-another-drink guy who almost always puts that drink on his tab. Ask Currence if he aspires to celebrity, he'll dog-cuss you. When he calms down he'll say, "Oxford has never asked for sea urchin with foie gras. I don't have to overreach. I've never had to keep up with the Joneses, and I think that's served me well."
Currence is the sort of chef who, in the six months leading up to his third nomination for a James Beard Award as the best chef in the South, was running a white tablecloth restaurant, fronted by French doors, one of which was missing a window pane. (Above City Grocery is City Grocery Bar, where drinks are poured with a heavy hand, inspiring the occasional frat boy to put a boot though the glass.) "You get the idea that what he really wants to do is run a dive bar with high-end food," says Pete Wells, dining editor of the New York Times, after dining recently at City Grocery.
All of which is to say, Currence doesn't put on airs. But he does win friends and influence people. Of late, he has emerged as one of the region's go-to guys. He's the chef Ben Barker of Magnolia Grill in Durham, North Carolina, taps when he's working a special event and needs a collaborator who can keep his head down, man the line, and hold his whiskey at the after-party. He's the guy Frank Stitt of Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham, Alabama, calls when he's going quail hunting and needs a wing man. He's the native son on whom Galatoire's bestows the honor of serving as the first guest chef in that fabled New Orleans restaurant's 100-plus years of operation.
Currence was born and raised in Uptown New Orleans. Private school New Orleans. Sazerac-fueled dinners at Antoine's New Orleans. The city matters much to Currence: In the wake of the levee failures that followed Hurricane Katrina, he spent a year and a half working as a volunteer crowbar jockey and general contractor, tearing apart and then putting back together Willie Mae's Scotch House, a Treme neighborhood fried chicken joint. And he still refers to the Kingpin, a favorite Uptown bar, as "the home office."
But after a college-era flirtation with Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he worked for the late Bill Neal of Crook's Corner fame, and a post-college stint in New Orleans, cooking for, among others, the Brennan family, Oxford has been home since 1992. At City Grocery, a plank-floored rectangle of a restaurant set in a onetime livery stable, he has honed an aesthetic that evokes the Hill Country of Mississippi, as interpreted by a keenly observant (and irreverent) son of the Crescent City.
The Currence world view translates on the table as boudin stuffed lamb loin swaddled in sweet potato puree. And Mississippi oysters Rockefeller, creamed with fennel perfumed collard greens, topped with a plank of crisp country ham dusted with powdered country ham. Dan Philips, proprietor of The Grateful Palate catalog, was so taken by that powdered country ham that he has packed it in a test tube, dubbed it Johnny Snack's Miracle Ham Dust, and began selling said tubes for 10 bucks a pop.
And—here comes the irreverent part—rabbit cacciatore, served during the week leading up to Easter, in a wide bowl, the rim of which Currence bejewels with multicolored jelly beans. "We've done the Easter Bunny thing every year since we opened," he recalls. "One year it's a confit; the next year it's a saddle. But it's always Brock's jelly beans."
Currence the chef doesn't pull punches. There are no feints. No jabs. His food is muscular. And playful. The best dishes to emerge from the City Grocery kitchen are unalloyed, unfiltered. Take a recent appetizer dubbed "pearls and swine," a jumble of Bourbon-confited pork cheeks tossed with truffled pearl couscous. Or a dessert special that reads like a rejoinder to critics who question whether Currence has lost his way, gone above his raising, gotten too big for his britches, choose your cliché: homemade moon pie with R.C. Cola sorbet and marshmallow cream.
Like many a chef, Currence now spends less time in the kitchen of his primary restaurant. Over the years he's been involved in a number of Oxford-based side projects. There was Nacho Mama's, a burrito joint where Currence set the tables with bottles of sriracha hot sauce as well as bowls of salsa, because, in his words, "The stuff is too great to deny."
Ajax Diner, set like City Grocery, on the Square, began as a joint effort with longtime friend Randy Yates. Since 2003, Yates has been the sole man at the helm, dishing fried quail and marshmallow-pocked sweet potato casserole. Bouré, Currence's answer to the Oxford arrival of Applebee's, has been open since 2002, serving burgers dressed with fried pickles and countrified rémoulade and kitchen sink salads hillocked with bacon. Currence's newest restaurant, Big Bad Breakfast, a closed-by-three-in-the-afternoon spot in the Sears shopping center just beyond the Square, should be open by the time you read these words. The name references a collection of short stories, Big Bad Love, written by the late Larry Brown, who made his home in Yocona, just beyond Oxford. On the roster will be cereal with milk from cows tended by Larry's son, Billy Ray. And bacon cured with Tabasco pepper sauce mash (the solids from which the fiery liquid is drained) and smoked in-house. And chili dogs served open-faced and heaped with Oysterette crackers.
Once he's sure that Big Bad will go well, Currence plans to write a cookbook. Look for it to be filled with tales of writers—George Plimpton, William Styron, Jim Harrison, and others—who have come to Oxford in search of the ghost of Faulkner and settled for a stiff drink and plate of shrimp and grits at City Grocery. Just don't expect money—shots of Currence impaling cubes of pork tenderloin on rosemary stem skewers while enthusing about the intramuscular marbling of his favorite breed of pig. Expect something smart. Something that confounds. Something that makes you laugh. And wince. All of which should explain, at least somewhat, why one of the titles under consideration is The Man Who Parked Your Car Doesn't Work for Me.
