John Currence opened City Grocery in Oxford, Mississippi in 1992. Since then, the City Grocery Restaurant Group has opened a number of restaurants, including Ajax Diner, Nacho Mama’ s, Kalo’ s Tavern, Big Bad Breakfast, Bouré , Lamar Lounge, The Main Event, and Snackbar. Currence is the recipient of the 2009 James Beard Award for Best Chef South and the Southern Foodways Alliance Guardian of the Tradition Award. He has appeared on television programs such as Parts Unknown, Mind of a Chef, Bizarre Foods, Treme, and Top Chef Masters and his writing has appeared in Food & Wine and Bon Appé tit, among many others. He is a contributing editor for Garden & Gun magazine, a board member of No Kid Hungry (a project dedicated to eradicating childhood hunger in the United States), and an organizer and past board member of the prestigious annual Southern Foodways Symposium.
