Ten years ago, Oxford, Miss., chef John Currence set out on a personal mission to make breakfast not only the most important meal of the day, but the most memorable, too.
Now, a decade after opening his first Big Bad Breakfast in a nondescript shopping strip in Oxford, the James Beard Award-winning chef is spreading the gospel of grits, bacon and cathead biscuits to cities across the South.
Currence opened the first branch location of Big Bad Breakfast in Birmingham in 2014 and another in Inlet Beach, Fla., last year, and earlier this year, he and his restaurant partners launched two more Alabama locations -- one in the Birmingham suburb of Homewood and another in the renaissance river city of Florence.
Plans include locations in Charleston, and possibly Chattanooga, Atlanta and New Orleans -- as well as two more in Birmingham, which Currence envisions becoming a Big Bad Breakfast hub.
"As of today," he says, "Charleston is next. But things are fluid now. We are going to continue growing the Birmingham market. We are very excited about Birmingham being sort of our store home base."
Expansion, though, will be cautious and deliberate, Currence adds.
"Our desire is to grow in as thoughtful and conservative a way as possible," he says. "We will consider anywhere that we find operating partners that we feel like that we can trust deeply.
"The challenge when it comes to growing a concept is, people just jump at real-estate deals in order to grow their concept. They let themselves grow without being managed properly. We can't afford that for a second because the quality of what we are delivering in the way of food and the service experience, they don't come from a book. Those things have to come from the heart."
Born and raised in New Orleans, Currence got started in the restaurant business while he was a student at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where he worked his way up through the kitchen at Bill Neal's legendary Crook's Corner.
After college, he returned to New Orleans at the invitation of a high school friend to be the sous chef at Gautreau's, and he later helped the Brennan family open Bacco.
Eager to start a place of his own, Currence moved to Oxford, the home of William Faulkner and Ole Miss football, and opened his Southern fine-dining restaurant City Grocery on the courthouse square in 1992. He now operates three other restaurants in Oxford -- Boure, Snackbar and the original Big Bad Breakfast, which opened in 2008.
In 2009, Currence won the James Beard Foundation Award for best chef in the South, and he has since authored two cookbooks, "Pickles, Pigs and Whiskey: Recipes from My Three Favorite Food Groups and Then Some" and "Big Bad Breakfast: The Most Important Book of the Day."
When he first decided to expand Big Bad Breakfast beyond Oxford, Currence partnered with Birmingham restaurateurs Nick Pihakis and John Michael Bodner.
There are lots of omelette and biscuit options at Big Bad Breakfast.(Tamika Moore/tmoore@al.com)
Pihakis, of Jim 'N Nick's Bar-B-Q, has grown the Jim 'N Nick's brand from a single restaurant that he and his father opened in Birmingham in 1985 to nearly 40 locations in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Colorado.
Currence met Pihakis through their involvement in the Southern Foodways Alliance, an institute of the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture that documents, studies and explores the diverse food cultures of the South.
"Here was a guy who was running a barbecue chain that looked at his barbecue from a philosophical standpoint in the same way that I was looking at my dumb, artsy, ham-fisted attempt at food," Currence says of Pihakis. "And he valued the integrity in every side dish that they did, and in every moment of the cooking process for his barbecue.
"That cemented for me that Nick was as stand-up a guy as I would ever want to know in my entire life," he adds. "We spent a lot of time talking about those things before we got engaged in this (Big Bad Breakfast).
"It was just fascinating to me that, while he was arguably sort of quote 'just doing barbecue,' he considered that barbecue no differently than the guys in the kitchen at Eleven Madison Park or at Highlands Bar and Grill considered what they were doing with their food every night."
Big Bad Breakfast was founded upon Currence's belief that breakfast deserves to be treated with that same respect.
"That's the whole intent, was to really give breakfast the same sort of attention that we've seen given to lunch and dinner," he says.
"We've sort of been squished into this belief that breakfast is supposed to be bacon and eggs and toast and biscuits, but there are ways to go way, way beyond that. So, that's what we are trying to do, while offering the things that satisfy folks who just want the basics."
The Big Bad Breakfast menu features such eye-openers as shrimp and grits, chicken and waffles, a fried oyster scramble, and a Creole omelet, along with house-cured Tabasco-brown sugar bacon, black pepper-buttermilk biscuits and Original Grit Girl grits.
The restaurant's name is an homage to one of Currence's favorite people, Oxford fireman-turned-writer Larry Brown. Brown, who died in 2004, published a collection of short stories titled "Big Bad Love."
"Larry would write from midnight to about six or seven in the morning and then go to sleep, so he was never awake in time for breakfast, although it was always his favorite meal," Currence says. "And it just tickled the hell out of me that he always complained that he never got to eat breakfast and it was his favorite meal of the day.
"So as we were approaching the opening and trying to figure out a name for the restaurant, it sort of hit me one day: Let's call it Big Bad Breakfast. His wife was working over at city hall, and I drove over there, and I told her what I wanted to do, and I asked for her blessings.
"She cried, I cried, and we hugged. And Big Bad Breakfast was born right there."
Ten years later, it's as big and bad as it ever was.
"It's a never-ending odyssey working with this concept," Currence says. "And that's the thing I love about it. It's like a living concept. It doesn't stop in its tracks."
