Breakfast is about to get bigger on Young Avenue.
On Sept. 29, Big Bad Breakfast will open its second Memphis location at 2149 Young Ave., bringing Chef John Currence’s Southern breakfast diner to Cooper-Young.
The restaurant occupies the former Mulan Asian Bistro space, which closed following a kitchen fire in 2025. The building has spent the intervening months undergoing a massive renovation, and Currence — a James Beard Award-winning chef — couldn’t be happier with the result.
“The work that we've put into it gives it another 25 or 30 years of life,” he told The Commercial Appeal during a recent chat about the opening. “It gives us a renewed vigor to the main engineering pieces, you know, of the building. And so, we're very excited to be in this
space. It's great looking, and we’re very pleased with it.”
They should be.
The Commercial Appeal recently visited for a sneak peek during a soft opening, and the new restaurant has the same open, casual lived-in quality found at Big Bad Breakfast's other Memphis location at 6450 Poplar.
Think wood tables, vinyl upholstery, tile, metal, brick, painted surfaces and framed nostalgic advertisements. Much of the aesthetic is inspired by the New Orleans cafés Currence grew up eating at as a kid.
What's on the menu at Big Bad Breakfast?
That influence carries over to the menu, which features Southern breakfast staples including shrimp and grits, bacon cured in Tabasco mash, brown sugar and spices, and, of course, the restaurant's famous and fluffy black pepper-buttermilk biscuits, made fresh throughout the day.
Among the items we ordered was the patty sausage, egg and cheese biscuit, along with the BBB “Crankshaft” coffee blend roasted by Royal Cup. Together, they made for the kind of breakfast duo that gets a morning going.
Then there was the French toast, which Currence said was the very first recipe he ever put on a menu as a young cook in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Served with powdered sugar on top, it has a rich, sweet flavor that Currence accurately compared to an irresistible doughnut.
He calls it “one of my favorite things in the whole wide world.”
And because he also suggested a savory item to go along with this sweet breakfast indulgence, we opted for the Old School Wrap, which is literally described as a “fistful of breakfast.”
This elevated breakfast burrito consists of scrambled eggs, breakfast sausage, pico de gallo, bell pepper and cheddar cheese, all wrapped up in a flour tortilla.
The wrap is served with a side of lime crema, which provides a cool balance to the heat of the pepper and salsa. Just don’t make the mistake we did and assume it's ranch dressing.
Ever dip your wrap expecting one thing and quickly learning it’s another? This is why you read the menu carefully before ordering.
Still, it was a delightful — and necessary — surprise. The tangy lime flavor made the savory ingredients, especially the eggs and cheese, taste even more vibrant.
Vibrant would also describe the wonderful attention we received from our server, Sterling Key. She had the kind of exuberant, enthusiastic nature of someone helping launch a new venture and genuinely excited about what was happening around her.
We’ll take Key's advice next time.
She heartily recommends the Fried Shrimp Scramble, described as a “California Gold Rush invention.” The entrée involves two eggs scrambled with bacon, onion, tomato, potatoes, mayo, then topped with fried shrimp and sliced jalapenos.
But it’s not all Southern comfort food at Big Bad Breakfast’s newest location. The Cooper-Young restaurant also offers lighter choices alongside its Southern staples, including avocado toast, steel-cut oatmeal, house-made granola and yogurt, egg-white omelets, wraps and salads. Vegetarian and gluten-free options are also available.
In other words, the Cooper-Young Big Bad Breakfast has all the same familiar favorites that have become signatures across the restaurant's growing Southern footprint.
Chef John Currence: From Oxford to Cooper-Young
Big Bad Breakfast started in Oxford in 2008, where Currence is based.
“I think we offered something unique in the breakfast lunch space,” he explained. “And folks had responded very nicely in Oxford to it. So we decided to give it a whirl and went to Birmingham to open our second one and took our time doing it. And you know folks in Birmingham responded equally well.”
Big Bad Breakfast now has more than 25 restaurants across the Southeast, with its strongest concentration in Alabama and Tennessee, and several more on the way in 2026.
“We have Cooper-Young in Memphis right now,” Currence said. “And then we'll open Brentwood and Murfreesboro in the Nashville area. Nice to finish out the year. And we don't have anything beyond that right now.”
Although there’s several Big Bad Breakfast locations spread across the South, don’t assume the new Cooper-Young location is simply a copy-and-paste addition to the regional chain.
That distinction appears to matter to Currence.
In discussing the Cooper-Young project, he emphasized the importance of making each Big Bad Breakfast feel connected to its surroundings rather than dropping an identical restaurant into every neighborhood.
He describes Cooper-Young as a place defined by art, creativity, independent businesses and a particular Memphis personality.
And he admits to having a history with the popular Memphis neighborhood.
“Cooper-Young was sort of accidentally the first neighborhood that I discovered in Memphis back in the early '90s when we opened City Grocery,” Currence admitted, referring to the first restaurant he opened in Oxford in 1992. The now-landmark fine-dining restaurant remains open in Oxford Square.
"Memphis was a pressure relief valve on Sundays, which is the only day we had off. And so we would immediately run to Memphis on Sundays to enjoy ourselves and I ended up finding all these vintage stores to pick up stuff, uh, to sort of populate our restaurant with.”
That history helps explain why, for Currence, opening in Cooper-Young is about more than adding another location to the Big Bad Breakfast map.
It's about returning to a neighborhood he discovered decades ago — this time, with breakfast.
Brian Strickland is the Food & Dining reporter at The Commercial Appeal. Contact him at brian.strickland@commercialappeal.com.
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Big Bad Breakfast
Where: 2149 Young Ave.
Hours: Open 7 a.m.-2:30 p.m. every day (except Thanksgiving and Christmas)
Online: bigbadbreakfast.com/memphis-cooper-young-tn/
This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Inside Big Bad Breakfast's new Memphis restaurant before opening day
