The Main Event

Beer first, with Oxford hands behind it

Beer leads the bar before the back bar does. John Currence, James Beard Award winner and owner of The Main Event in Plainview, keeps this place in the plainspoken register of a sports bar, where the program has to carry volume, noise, families, and game-day pace without pretending to be a cocktail room. His work has long been organized around restaurants that know their category and do not apologize for it: City Grocery, Big Bad Breakfast, Snackbar, and The Main Event. The through-line is not a repeated format. It is a habit of building rooms around use, appetite, and rhythm.

Currence’s kitchen life began at the bottom of the hierarchy, washing dishes at Bill Neal's Crook's Corner in Chapel Hill before returning there as chef. By 1989 he was sous chef at Gautreau's in New Orleans. Since 1992 he has owned City Grocery; since 2008, Big Bad Breakfast; since 2009, Snackbar. The Main Event sits differently from those Oxford addresses in the public record, but it belongs to the same operator’s vocabulary of durable, legible hospitality.

A bar program built for pints

The Main Event’s drink work is beer-centric: handcrafted ales and microbrews form the spine of the bar, with classic drinks filling in for guests who want spirits rather than a pint. The house does not name signature cocktails, and that absence says something useful about the method. This is not a station arranged around tinctures, rare vermouth, or a long list of proprietary builds. It is a back bar set up for reach, repetition, and the kind of service where a bartender can move from a draft pull to a rocks glass without turning the moment into theater.

The craft here sits in selection and pace. A sports bar with a broad beer list has to make room for different drinkers at the same rail: lager drinkers, ale drinkers, the guest looking for a microbrew, the guest who wants the familiar pour. The glassware follows the work rather than decorating it, pint glasses for beer, highballs and rocks glasses for the classic calls. Currence’s better-known signatures, including Tomato Gravy, Buttermilk-Lemon Chess Pie, and Comeback Sauce, come from another part of his table, but they point to the same discipline: clarity first, complication only when it earns its place.

The room keeps the game in motion

The room is loud by design. Screens give the bar its tempo, and the counter has to absorb the rise and drop of attention as a game turns. The Main Event’s casual frame matters here because the work is not hushed; it happens in public, in rounds, with plates moving, glasses landing, and a mixed crowd using the same room in different ways. The pass and the bar share a job: keep the evening from snagging.

That kind of place tests management more than ornament. A table may be there for barbecue, a family meal, or a period of play on the screen, and the room has to hold all of it without changing costume. The craft is the long way only if it repeats cleanly when the room fills. At The Main Event, the clearest object on the rail is still the microbrew pint.