LOCATION: 9.3
On the northwest corner of the square in Oxford, in the location of the old Downtown Grill, Boure’s location is one of the most enviable in the state.
ATMOSPHERE: 7.2
Boure’s interior is lovely, and it has an easygoing vibe and decor that make it feel faintly like a big-city steakhouse. As with so many restaurants these days, and especially at night, it would benefit from having fewer mouth-breathers wearing shorts and baseball caps, but sadly this is the world we live in, and it’s hard to fault the restaurant for it.
FOOD: 6.5
Boure is another John Currence venture. As we’ve experienced at Snack Bar and Big Bad Breakfast, the hype over Currence’s operations greatly exceeds the actual experiences there.
First, the positives: The Boure burger, much like the one at its sister restaurant Snack Bar, is really good. On its own, it easily climbs into the eights. The iceberg wedge salad, while not exactly “classic,” is also really good, and to the extent that it departs from the classic preparation, it does so with flair. The grilled salmon is creative and delicious.
Now, the negatives: As we mentioned in our review of Big Bad Breakfast, after reading more fawning reviews in the foodie press of Currence and his restaurants than we can shake a fork at, we keep waiting to be blown away by one of them, and it just hasn’t happened. We’ve eaten at Boure several times in 2022, and while the experience has never been bad, neither has it ever been better than… pretty good. Is that what we’re to expect, what we’re to be happy with? Boure’s prices are in the “moderate” category, and for the most part, you get something that’s, again… pretty good for the price. But nothing has yet made us feel like we’re getting away with something, or that we’ve stumbled upon a hidden gem, or made us wonder, “how does he do this?”
The shrimp and grits is a perfect example of what we’re talking about. In this one dish we have a microcosm of what we believe is the Boure experience, and indeed our entire John Currence experience up to this point. Let us explain:
The dish features a fried grits cake. This is a great idea, and in fact is pretty well executed. Frying grits in the shape of a crab cake is harder than it sounds. It wants very badly to stick to the bottom of the pan. It wants even worse to come apart when flipped over. It delights in flopping onto the plate as an ill-formed, greasy, sloppy mess. Producing something that’s crisp on the outside, hot and tender on the inside, and all in one neat piece requires that you get a lot of things right, from the consistency of the grits, to the heat of the oil, to the time spent frying, to the way it’s handled and flipped in the pan. On all these counts the kitchen at Boure succeeded. It’s also, we believe, perhaps a superior way of doing grits in a shrimp-and-grits recipe, because most sauces, when poured over normally-cooked grits, tend to turn them sooner or later into a gritty soup. The fried grits cake goes a long way toward defeating that. Unfortunately, this is where the positives about Boure’s interpretation of this classic low-country delicacy ends.
The shrimp were bland and rubbery, completely lacking the faint sweetness and the borderline-lobstery texture of Gulf shrimp, even when they’ve been frozen and thawed. Boure’s shrimp had all the classic indications that they did not come from the Gulf, and that they were previously frozen, but not head-on and in their shells, which helps preserve flavor and texture. It would be interesting to learn where the shrimp came from. If they’re from the Gulf, then we have to wonder why Currence and his staff would allow such an inferior product in their kitchen, when so many superior ones are available. If they’re not from the Gulf, then we can only shake our heads and wonder why.
There was an abundance of diced andouille sausage; in fact, an over-abundance. The smoky, meaty flavor completely overwhelmed whatever faint taste of shrimp the little crustaceans struggled to bring to the dish. The amount of red and green bell pepper not only bordered on comical, but they were julienned in a way that made them particularly difficult to scoop up alongside a shrimp or a piece of andouille — they were forever hanging off both sides of the fork, and seemed almost to fight being put into one’s mouth. A medium or small dice would have been a huge improvement. Along with the rest of the vegetables, they were also severely undercooked. In shrimp and grits, vegetables are ideally slightly al dente, but these were barely heated through, indeed almost raw. It was almost as if the chef had forgotten to add them to the dish until just before it left the kitchen, and threw them on top hoping the dish’s residual heat would at least warm them slightly before they reached the table. They weren’t integrated at all into the dish’s flavor profile, but rather served as disjointed filler — culinary and visual — in a dish that actually got less enjoyable the longer we ate it. In the end, we left uneaten the lion’s share of everything that wasn’t a shrimp or a grit. It was as though the kitchen had decided that if they couldn’t make it great, they’d simply make it big.
Was it bad? No. Was it good? Meh. It was “okay.” Let’s put it another way: Eating it to the point where we were full was preferable to sending it back and waiting on something else to be delivered.
“But Spoonful,” we can hear some saying, “aren’t you fixating on the shrimp and grits a little too much? Aren’t you basing too much of your opinion of this place on one single dish?”
Spoonful’s answer: No.
We’ve eaten, and noted, better dishes on the menu, like the burger, the wedge salad, and the salmon. But the thing with those dishes is, as long as you stay reasonably close to classic preparations, you can’t go too wrong. Shrimp and grits is different, partly because there are dozens of preparations that can legitimately lay claim to being “classic,” but mainly because there are so many variables in the dish — different types of ingredients requiring different techniques — that a poor understanding of how the finished product is supposed to taste, or a poor mastery of the techniques required for a good outcome, are far more easily exposed than in dishes as forgiving as hamburgers and wedge salads. Like Eggs Benedict (at which, by the way, another Currence venture — Big Bad Breakfast — failed), shrimp and grits is a dish that immediately reveals whether or not a kitchen can execute above a level that’s merely average, and on this count the kitchen at Boure barely clears the bar.
SERVICE: 7.2
Boure’s waitstaff have consistently been solid performers. Typical of what we’ve experienced, our server Dylan was professional, friendly, and prompt.
OVERALL: 7.6
At the risk of sounding like we’ve got it in for John Currence (we don’t), after several visits to three of his restaurants in Oxford, we’re left wondering: Did we miss his restaurants’ heyday? Have the fawning reviewers been fortunate enough to dine at times of the day or night when the food is, for whatever reason, wildly better than the times we’ve been? Have those reviewers simply not had any experience dining in truly superior restaurants? How hard is it, really, to win a James Beard Award? Have we been the unfortunate “beneficiaries” of chefs in training, or “bad nights” for the kitchen staff?
We’re thinking, at least on the last question, that the answer is “no.” Much more likely, we believe, is one of two things: Either it’s been a long time since Currence actually sat down and ate the food that’s coming out of his kitchens; or that he’s not, in fact, all that his copious awards and publicity make him out to be. We just find it hard to believe that someone who has earned all the accolades Currence has can look at, much less taste, a dish put in front of him like the shrimp and grits at Boure, and be satisfied with its mediocre execution, or fail to notice that it seems to be a pattern at his restaurants. Either Currence’s ideas of what should be put on the plate aren’t very well-formulated, or they are well-formulated but they’re just not being executed by the people he’s hired to man his kitchens. We hope it’s the latter, because that can be fixed. But the former? Well, as they say… it is what it is.
If you look at the numbers, you’ll notice that it’s Boure’s stellar location that raises its composite score into the mid-sevens. Relocate it to, for example, the sad little strip mall where Snack Bar and BBB are, and it drops squarely into the sixes. We’ll say it again: We’re still waiting to be blown away by a John Currence restaurant.