By David S. Rotenstein
NKyTribune staff writer
Cheers was the fictional Boston watering hole where everyone knew your name. Inside the television sitcom bar, patrons felt comfortable working out the world’s problems big and small over a beer and inside a 30-minute timeframe. Northern Kentucky is full of Cheers-like places, only they’re coffeeshops, diners, and bookstores. The connections made and the problems solved are more local: they could be concerns over your child’s school or economic development in your neighborhood.
The Hotel Covington isn’t a basement bar and it isn’t a TV show set. It opened inside a rehabilitated historic department store in downtown Covington in 2016. Coppins restaurant occupies a big chunk of the hotel’s spacious lobby. Named for the earlier store, Coppins quickly became a popular meeting spot for Covington residents, especially mornings when local leaders and even journalists sit at tables and do business over coffee and tea.
Coppins is one of several Northern Kentucky establishments where important conversations take place and where key connections are made. These meeting places are what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “third places” in a landmark 1999 book, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at The Heart of a Community.
What makes these places special and important parts of Northern Kentucky communities?
“The third place is not home and it’s not work,” said Murray State University professor Chris Woolridge. He collaborates with the Kentucky League of Cities to train public officials on the importance of third places and how to use them to be better public servants. “The third place is where you can kind of go hang out — it’s where all the people go to solve all the world’s problems.”
Woolridge said that there are lots of reasons why public officials choose coffeeshops and other places outside of their offices to conduct business. The spaces offer informal settings where constituents can feel comfortable.
“There are people who will come up to the mayor or to a city council person, or maybe a city planner or whatever on a Saturday morning, having coffee at the local coffeeshop and restaurant and maybe pull up a chair and sit down and go, can I talk to you about some things that concern me,” Woolridge explained.
It’s an effective approach, for residents and officials.
“I’ve had mayors tell me that in our sessions that [they] can learn more going at the local coffeeshop or restaurant on Saturday mornings than I can find out sometimes in city council meetings about how the public feels,” Woolridge said.
City Hall satellite
Covington Director of Neighborhood Services Brandon Holmes agrees. He regularly meets people, including reporters, at local coffeeshops. Coppins is one of his favorite and most accessible spots.
“I’ve done a lot of business over the years in coffee shops,” Holmes said while seated inside Coppins on a rainy December morning. Coppins is convenient to city hall and the historic building offers him a chance to show off one of the city’s economic development success stories.
“We use this as an opportunity to show off what the city has to offer and, you know, the vibrancy of the city,” Holmes said. “If you bring somebody into this location that’s never been in Covington before, pretty much any time of the day, they’re going to see people from all different walks of life coming through.”
There’s also an added benefit to meeting at Coppins: the current Covington municipal offices, which will be moving to a new Scott Street building after its completion, are a bit cramped and sterile. “We don’t have the best facilities,” Holmes admitted.
Holmes shared a bit of the Hotel Covington building’s history that makes it a perfect place to conduct city business.
“At one point in time, this building we’re sitting in right now was city hall,” Holmes said. “We had a city hall long ago, a majestic city hall that was torn down with some revitalization and since then, we’ve kind of been in patch workplaces.”
Coppins is a textbook third place. Holmes can schedule meetings there and he frequently bumps into people, like reporters and city residents, who want to bend his ear before or after pre-arranged meetups.
Go where the people go
“You want to go where the people go,” said Murray State’s Woolridge.
In Florence, one of the places locals like to go is the Velocity Bike and Bean coffeeshop.
“Usually it’s pretty packed in here,” said Boone County Board of Education member Carolyn Hankins Wolfe. She had no trouble finding a seat after ordering her coffee shortly after the Florence establishment opened on a December Wednesday morning.
“This is where I meet on Fridays for just the community,” Wolfe said on a recent December morning. “I’ve always gone to try to get in the public to meet people in different places.”
First elected in 2022 to fill an unexpired term and elected to a full term in 2024, Wolfe began hanging out in a Hebron coffeeshop near her home. She switched to Velocity Bike and Bean to be more accessible to educators and parents.
“I’m able to come here once a week. And some weeks, nobody comes to see me. Some weeks, it’s insane who I have come to see me,” Wolfe said.
Frequently, folks drop in just to chat and catch up.
“Sometimes they come to talk to me about policy or they’re having a problem in the schools and they need to figure out how to navigate it,” Wolfe explained. “It’s important that people in the district see that I’m in the community talking to people, especially like the superintendent and people in the district office.”
Skip the campaign event and hit the coffeeshop
As the 2026 election season ramps up, candidates and their proxies will fan out across the region to community meetings, fundraisers, and other events. These are often crowded settings and they offer few opportunities for private conversations.
If you want to connect with a candidate or other public official and want a more intimate and inviting setting, consider sending them an email or checking out their social media to see if they hold what some journalists call “office hours” at third places.
Take some advice from Woolridge: “If I’m running for office, I want to know where the locals hang out because that’s that third place. That’s where they’re going to go talk.”
(Editor’s note: Other popular ‘third places’ are Reality Tuesdays in Park Hills, Panera in Edgewood, Sake Bomb in Newport, The Press in Newport, The Hive in Erlanger. These lists are by no means comprehensive but serve as examples of popular hang-outs.)