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Photo by Angie Mosier
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Photo courtesy of Ten Speed Press
Breakfast is an always food, or so says John Currence. In between taking home the James Beard Award for Best Chef: South and the Southern Foodways Alliance Guardian of Tradition Award, he's brought the meal back in a big way at his line-out-the-door Big Bad Breakfast restaurants.
Out now is his new cookbook, "Big Bad Breakfast: The Most Important Book of the Day," and he's bringing piled-high biscuits, sausage cinnamon rolls and eggs galore to a few towns, among them Richmond. On Monday, Oct. 24, he'll swing by Southbound in Bon Air to cook up breakfast for dinner, so we caught up with the chef, author and omelet enthusiast to find out his cure for hangovers, his favorite fast-food breakfast sandwich and the inescapable allure of the day's most important meal.
Richmond magazine: What is it about breakfast that's universally appealing, no matter the time of day?
John Currence: I think it's the one meal of the day that everybody's happy about. The thing I continue to go back to is: Nobody breaks up with their boyfriend or girlfriend over breakfast. [laughs] Nobody gets fired over breakfast. It's just a meal where folks are universally happy, and I think there's an air of frivolity around scrambled eggs and toast and jelly and bacon. Everything's sort of about mixing sweet and salty; it's the umami meal to me. And I think it's particularly fun because nobody's really paid attention to it for a very long time, so it makes it easy for it to excel just because nobody applies the same philosophical principles to breakfast, or they haven't historically as we do for lunch and dinner. You know, you have to bow down to the table at dinner, and to a certain degree at lunch as well, but breakfast is just sort of shoved off to Cracker Barrel and it's become this mass-produced garbage. And people don't really make breakfast a lot, unless it's on the weekends, and so we just thought, "What if we applied those same principles as we do to lunch and dinner?" And then all of a sudden now you've got this sort of transcendent meal.
RM: Breakfast for dinner can almost feel like an irreverent action, like a "Take that!" to convention. I'm guessing people have been responding well to that on your tour?
JC: Yeah! But oddly, while doing this kind of breakfast-for-dinner tour, as I started planning it, it felt forced in a lot of places. I thought, "While folks really like the idea of breakfast for dinner, I don't know if we're really going to sell that many tickets," and the book doesn't lend itself to button-up dinners, and so we started this idea of "Well, let's just do like a dive-bar tour or get friends to make a couple dishes out of the book and just have fun with it." That then just became, "Well, if we've got a place that's dark on the weekends, let's do something during the day, too." Today, in Raleigh, we sold a mountain of books. It's just sort of taken on a life of its own as we're going place to place. Sunday morning I'll go back to Crook's Corner to a kitchen where I haven't cooked in 28 years, and then on Monday I'll go to Richmond for a breakfast-for-dinner event, which sort of works with Lee [Gregory] and Joe [Sparatta] and those guys.
RM: How did you get hooked up with Lee and Joe?
JC: I think they were drinking way too much at the Atlanta Food & Wine Festival, and I wouldn't let it go. I was like, "Ah, you opened your mouth and you offered, so you're stuck." They made the mistake of offering an old man an olive branch, and I just devoured it.
RM: Are you more of a sweet- or savory-in-the-morning kind of person?
JC: It depends. I tend to cook an omelet pretty regularly, despite the fact that my daughter kind of drives the program of what we eat in the house in the morning. If you have kids, you know that with 3-year-olds in particular, you either throw food away or you eat a significant amount of your meal off of their plate. I love to cook an omelet just to stay tuned up, but also because an omelet is just a great clearing house for stuff in your fridge. When I was a kid I ate everything from crab omelets to jelly omelets. But, you know, my dirty little secret is I freaking love doughnuts; any chance I get to get my hands on a good glazed doughnut...
RM: Classic glazed?
JC: Yeah, I'm a plain glazed, vanilla milkshake, vanilla ice cream guy.
RM: A few people — including celebrity chefs like David Chang — have said eating at Big Bad Breakfast was a transcendent experience, especially the day after a party. What's your ideal hangover food?
JC: [Chang] said that the Pylon [a split, griddled hot dog with chili, slaw, cheddar, mustard, pickles, onion, jalapeños and crackers piled on a waffle] saved his life the morning after his first book dropped and he came to Oxford [Mississippi]. To me, it's a Bloody Mary. I'm definitely a hair-of-the-dog believer. If I'm not obligated to do something, there's no better cure for what ails you than just divin' right back in again. If it came down to having to select a plate to cure me, it's probably our chili cheese omelet: It's an omelet with chili and cheddar cheese on the inside, then we [add] a little bit of chili and cheese on the top with green onions. It was sort of modeled after a couple things: There's a bean chili omelet at The Camellia Grill in New Orleans, and in college there was a place in Lynchburg and in Roanoke called The Texas Inn [Editor's note: now more commonly referred to as "The T Room"] — they were tiny little five-seat-counter places and all they served was chili by the bowl. You either got chili, or chili loaded all the way. So late-night, that's where everybody wrapped it up and got a bowl of chili before they went to bed, which kind of makes me want to vomit a little bit now.
RM: Are you a firm believer in eating while you're out that night, or eating the next day? Or is it more eating both times?
JC: Ha, do you want me to be an idealist or do you want me to be honest? I love, love eating ridiculous and indefensible late-night meals, but at 52, I don't have the metabolism to justify it anymore. In college, there was a Hardee's, and it was the only fast-food place in Farmville. And Hardee's, at 11 o'clock at night, would start serving its breakfast menu. So after the bars closed, you could go and get a chicken-and-cheese or a steak-and-cheese biscuit. I love nothin' more. I'd get those, a giant iced tea, and that was my sign-off. I could eat that when I was 19, 20 years old, and there were no repercussions. I just gained two pounds just thinking about it.
RM: What's your favorite fast-food breakfast?
JC: I'm in the country right now, so Bojangles'. Bojangles' chicken biscuit, across the board. I love what Bojangles does. I was never nostalgic for Egg McMuffins or McDonald's breakfast, and Burger King's never really done anything for me. I tried the Taco Bell kitty litter breakfast whatever, and it was just awful. So yeah, Bojangles. I don't really do it often because I'm Catholic and I feel very guilty about eating those sorts of things; I pretty much just relegate it to the best cup of coffee I can find.
RM: Well we've got a whole lot of good coffee for you in Richmond when you get here.
JC: There's a whole lot of everything that I can't wait to get into there.
Taste your way through John Currence's "Big Bad Breakfast: The Most Important Book of the Day" at Monday night's dinner at Southbound. Each $50 ticket includes a three-course meal and a copy of Currence's new book. Call 918-5431 to make a reservation.
