The Salty Hen
Home-cooked comfort in Pulaski County
WHEN CHRISTINA KEPHART and her husband, Robbie, brainstormed name ideas for her new restaurant, they kept encountering images of roosters. But it wasn’t going to be the rooster doing all the work, Christina complained. It was the hen. Robbie wondered aloud how the hen felt about this. “She’s a little salty,” Christina said—and The Salty Hen was born.
Christina’s locally-famous onion rings and fried green tomatoes are hand-cut daily. The fried pickles and fried chicken are hand-battered to order, and the cornbread is made from scratch and baked in a cast-iron skillet sizzling with bacon grease. “My entire heart goes into my food,” she says. “I like to feed people.”
While she had food service experience before opening a restaurant, Christina had never run her own business. But with Robbie’s encouragement, she took the leap. “You can talk about what could be—but unless you try, you don’t know,” she says.
Housed in a former filling station on State Route 1643, about 8 miles east of Somerset, the restaurant celebrated one year in business on February 15. “It has done nothing but get busier and busier and busier since I got here,” Christina says, crediting her success so far to ‘the best customers in the world’ and her husband’s tireless support. One of those world’s-best customers gifted the restaurant a sculpture, made by a local artist, that now stands outside the restaurant.
“It’s come a long way,” she says. “I’m very proud of it. And it’s not just mine—it’s everybody’s. It’s the whole community’s. That’s the way I feel about it.”
Served by South Kentucky RECC, The Salty Hen is located at 6521 State Route 1643 in Somerset, open 11 a.m.–8 p.m. Tuesday–Saturday, closed Sunday and Monday.
