Oxford, Miss. | John Currence, the owner of the City Grocery
Restaurant Group, decided to let someone else do the cooking at his company’s
namesake restaurant in Oxford, Miss. for eight nights in January and February.
He began his third edition of the “Big Bad Popups,” a
monthlong dinner series that features guest chefs in his kitchen at City
Grocery on Jan. 19. The event is hosted on Monday and Tuesday nights, lasting a
month and features a new chef each week.
This year’s run began on Jan. 19 with Currence and the City
Grocery staff’s offering their take on Chinese-American dishes under the title
of the “Sleepy Dragon Project.”
The next week, Vishwesh Bhatt the chef at Snackbar and Asha
Gomez of Atlanta served Southern-influenced Indian street food under the title
“Mumbai, Mississippi.”
Beginning last night and continuing this evening,
Memphis-area chef and owner of Restaurant Iris and The Second Line, Kelly
English will debut “Second Line 662” which will feature his usual New
Orleans-style dishes while also previewing some new items that will be featured
at Second Line’s new location in Oxford, which opens later this spring.
Corbin Evans of the Oxford Canteen will conclude the series
on Feb. 9-10 with a taste of North Mississippi’s alley food under the title of
the “The 132 Foot Journey.”
The series began when Currence closed City Grocery for
six-weeks in 2013 in order to renovate the kitchen. He wanted to give his staff
and payrolled employees something to do while the restaurant was closed, and
the series would allow him to donate proceeds to charity.
“Part of the fun is being a little irreverent,” Currence
said. “Last year, it was a little more serious. Rodney Scott was doing his
traveling tour, and we did dinners for that. This year, we decided to return to
the format of the first year.”
The event is anything but serious on English’s opening
night. The wait staff has donned their finest Mardi Gras gear with many of the
waitresses’ sporting long, colorful fake eyelashes. Colored wigs appear
required rather than permissible.
The usually quiet dining area of the City Grocery more
resembles the dining area of a fraternity house on a football game day. Gone
are the usual white tables that adorn City Grocery’s tables and the reserved
tone that usually accompanies a meal at Currence’s flagship restaurant.
“My staff is totally befuddled by me because they know how
seriously I take City Grocery, how I treat it like my first born,” Currence
said. “They can’t believe I’m up for all the decorating, but I said I’m not
only up for it, but we’re not going to take any of it down until it’s over,
either. We’ll have Christmas lights, lanterns, maybe pirates for all I know.”
There are no pirates here tonight at 152 Courthouse Square,
but there is a country fried steak and enchiladas made from scratch on a menu
offered in City Grocery, an occurrence almost as implausible as seeing a
pirate.
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