FOOD

Greyhound Tavern’s Sunday brunch is at its best when breakfast and the restaurant’s Southern comfort-food identity collide on the same plate. This is not a morning buffet that merely adds one token lunch entree. The house fried chicken is a genuine centerpiece, and the hot side reaches into the tavern’s regular vocabulary with meat loaf, mashed potatoes and a staffed carving station. Breakfast is fully present, but it has to share the table.

The fried chicken is the natural first anchor. Greyhound’s version uses the herbed-flour style that has defined the restaurant for generations, giving the buffet a savory centerpiece that already has a life far beyond brunch. It is especially effective beside mashed potatoes, where the plate suddenly reads less like breakfast and more like Sunday dinner. That crossover is the entire point of the buffet: the house specialty does not arrive as an afterthought to the eggs.

Then goetta pulls the meal firmly back into Greater Cincinnati. The regional sausage sits with eggs, bacon, sausage and potatoes, turning a familiar breakfast line into something unmistakably local. Freshly prepared eggs keep the morning side moving, while French toast and biscuits provide the softer, sweeter counterweight. These are not novelty items, and they do not need to be. Greyhound’s strength is how naturally the expected breakfast staples fit beside food with much deeper tavern roots.

The lunch side gives repeat trips a different purpose. Tavern meat loaf and mashed potatoes bring straight-ahead comfort, while the carving station supplies another substantial centerpiece that can move a second plate decisively away from breakfast. It is an important piece of the buffet’s logic: one pass can stay close to eggs, goetta and French toast, while the next can look much more like the midday meal Greyhound has been serving for generations.

The supporting cast can move from week to week, which keeps the middle of the buffet from becoming too fixed. Chef specialties rotate through the service, and that flexibility is useful at a restaurant with such a broad regular menu. The important pieces remain recognizable: breakfast meats, eggs and griddle favorites on one side of the idea; fried chicken, meat loaf, carving and potatoes on the other. The buffet has range without losing the foods that make it recognizably Greyhound.

Fresh fruit gives the plate a necessary reset between the heavier rounds, while cookies and pastries provide a simple dessert finish. That restraint suits Greyhound. The sweets do not need to become a separate spectacle when the more memorable indulgence is the ability to move from goetta and eggs to fried chicken and mashed potatoes before deciding that French toast still counts as dessert-adjacent.

The result is not about chasing the largest possible item count. Greyhound’s brunch is more specific than that: an old-school buffet whose appeal comes from continuity, regional identity and the unusually satisfying overlap between breakfast and Sunday supper. Fried chicken, goetta, eggs, French toast, meat loaf and potatoes tell the story quickly. The carving station and rotating specialties keep another trip open-ended, but the essential pleasure is already clear: familiar Northern Kentucky food, rearranged one plate at a time.