Piper’s Ice Cream Bar, the immensely popular ice cream walk-up window in Covington’s Mainstrasse Village, has moved across the street and upgraded to a full-service ice cream parlor.
In their new location on 6th Street, Piper’s will now have both indoor and outdoor seating alongside plenty of new menu options that are now available thanks to the larger space.
Chip Adkins, who co-owns the business with his husband Charles Killian, said the move was necessary because they’ve massively outgrown the walk-up window; just storing enough ingredients to keep up with demand “used every bit of space possible.”
“If you ever remember looking inside the old Piper’s, we had everything floor-to-ceiling. I mean, I had shelves all the way around. We’d been there thirteen years, and used every bit of space we could use. We were to our limit,” Adkins said. “We’d have lines coming out to the sidewalk and past the building next door and on down the alley, full of people just standing there patiently waiting to get an ice cream.”
Piper’s originally opened as Piper’s Café and Ice Cream Bar during Oktoberfest in 2012, with a focus on home-grown dishes. Adkins’ team locally sourced every ingredient they could and made everything they couldn’t themselves, including “ketchup, mustard, mayo, pancake syrup, all kinds of crazy stuff.”
Around the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Adkins realized food service was going to be a challenge in the near future, thanks to the rising cost of ingredients, and transitioned into focusing solely on ice cream. Just because the business moved to ice cream full-time, however, doesn’t mean any less effort goes into it.
Currently, thanks to the number of bases, delivery mechanisms and flavor concentrates available to create your own special ice cream order at Piper’s, there are over 100,000 flavor combinations—and that’s before you even get into toppings, sauces, compotes and the like. (You can see why they ran out of space.)
“We already had a pretty big menu, and we’re adding more… It’s a ton of choices, and that can be overwhelming for some people. We try to help by posting a menu of our 25 most popular combinations of the last year,” he said. “Our motto that we’ve had since the beginning is ‘It’s time for something different.’ You could get pretty crazy with it and come here every day and never have the same thing twice if you don’t want to.”
As far as new items go, Piper’s is trying a lot of new things. The restaurant plans to expand into pastries à la mode, but has currently settled on what Adkins calls “Pop Tarts à la Mode,” which is exactly what it sounds like: your choice of Pop-Tarts flavor with any of their soft-serve combinations.
In addition, they’ve added frozen coffees, a new item called the Snowstorm—any flavor soft-serve with dry toppings mixed in that’s “comparable to a Blizzard from the big guy”—and tons of new toppings like pistachio crumbles, chocolate eclairs, and gummy bears. Earlier this year, Piper’s also added a completely vegan ice cream base for customers to try.
Now that they’re a full-service parlor rather than a walk-up window, Piper’s will finally have standardized hours, not changing every season: noon to 10 p.m., every single day. While the new Piper’s is currently open to the public and “completely functional,” there’s still plenty of decoration coming at the new location. In the next month, before the official grand opening, murals and art will be put up inside and outside of the building, along with outdoor lights and seating.
Mainstrasse Village goers still haven’t fully realized that the business has moved, Adkins said, other than their “consistent regulars, especially the ones who will eat ice cream when it’s 40 below just as much as they’ll eat it when it’s 80 above.” But he’s already overjoyed about being on the corner of one of the neighborhood’s busiest streets and adding a new flavor to the local community.
“This building has been empty for a couple years. Just seeing it being used again is amazing to me. Our second night open, driving by and seeing all the lights on, I thought, ‘Wow, that looks really good,'” Adkins said. “My employees are loving it. It’s taken a lot of work and a lot of planning, but it’s coming together the way we want it to.”
The new Piper’s Ice Cream Bar location is open from 12 p.m. to 10 p.m. daily at 503 W. 6th Street in Covington.