Bouré

The Restaurant

Bouré sits in the old Leslie's Drug Store / Downtown Grill building on the north side of the Lafayette County Courthouse — a property that has held a working restaurant since the late 1990s and is the second flagship in John Currence's City Grocery Restaurant Group. The room is a deep two-storey space with a balcony running along the second-floor wraparound and a generous main bar at the entrance. The dining room seats about 110 across the two levels, with private balcony tables that overlook the Square.

The cooking is decisively Creole, with a Louisiana vocabulary that City Grocery itself does not lean on — Bouré is where Currence's New Orleans training shows most directly. The shrimp and grits here are explicitly different from City Grocery's: lighter, with andouille, Crystal hot sauce, and a less reduced cream base. The gumbo is a chicken-and-andouille rendition cooked from a roux that takes ninety minutes; the étouffée uses Gulf crayfish in season. Larger plates include a blackened redfish with crawfish cream, a slow-braised short rib over Conecuh-grits cake, and a jambalaya that the bar programme has aligned its sazerac selection around.

The bar is the city's second-most-serious drinks programme after City Grocery's own. The wine list is shorter (around 120 references) and more value-oriented, but the cocktail card is full New Orleans, including a sazerac, a vieux carré, and a Pimm's cup that Currence has refined over twenty years. Michelin's first American South list named Bouré as recommended in 2025 — a recognition that places all three Currence rooms (City Grocery, Snackbar, Bouré) within five minutes' walk of one another and on the same list.