The Restaurant
Coppin's opened in 2016 inside the Hotel Covington — a beaux-arts municipal building completed in 1910 that served as Covington's city hall, then a department store, and finally a boutique hotel after a $24 million renovation led by local developer Salyers Group. The restaurant occupies the building's former public marble lobby, a soaring high-ceilinged room with restored bronze fixtures, exposed-brick walls, and a centrepiece zinc bar that runs the length of the Madison Avenue frontage. The dining capacity of about one hundred and ten covers is split between the main floor, a quieter mezzanine balcony, and a covered courtyard that opens to the hotel's interior garden.
The kitchen, led since opening by executive chef Eric Hunley, runs a New Appalachian programme rooted in the bourbon-country geography of Northern Kentucky and the surrounding Ohio River foodshed. Signature plates include the bourbon-glazed pork belly with stone-ground white grits and pickled mustard seed, the cast-iron seared Kentucky catfish with hush-puppy crumb and tomato-bacon jam, the dry-aged ribeye from Stone Cross Farm with smoked-onion soubise, and a country-ham board sourced from Father's Country Hams in Bremen, Kentucky. The breakfast menu — served daily and a signature of the hotel — features biscuits-and-gravy with house sausage and a sorghum-glazed fried chicken sandwich that has become a Cincinnati-region pilgrimage dish.
The bar programme is the operating signature: more than two hundred Kentucky bourbons organised by distillery and age, a rotating barrel-pick programme that lets the bar select single barrels exclusively for the hotel, and a cocktail list built around bourbon-and-rye classics with house-made tinctures. Service is at the upper tier of Greater Cincinnati: career captains, captain-led wine rounds, and a hotel-restaurant discipline that knows how to handle business breakfasts at 7am and proposal dinners at 9pm in the same room. Cincinnati Magazine named the restaurant Best in Northern Kentucky in 2022, 2023, and 2024 — the longest unbroken run any Covington address has held the title.
Why This Is Covington’s Impress Clients Pick
For clients flying into Cincinnati / Northern Kentucky International Airport for a Greater Cincinnati meeting, Coppin's is the address that does the talking. The Madison Avenue location reads as deliberate — a host who chose the Kentucky side of the river rather than the obvious downtown Cincinnati pick signals an editorial command of the region. The two-hundred-bottle Kentucky bourbon programme gives the host a guided narrative for a category that out-of-state guests almost always want to explore. The dining room is populated enough to feel active and acoustic enough to negotiate. And the hotel-anchor format means a guest can finish dinner and walk twelve feet to the elevator — the discreet, polished close that the most senior conversations require.
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