Start from 23 curated places around Pikeville, KY, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
The Blue Raven
The best dinner in Pikeville, a pub-style Appalachian restaurant on Main Street serving elevated Southern cuisine in a warm, unpretentious room. The jumbo lump crab cake and goat cheese salad with pistachio and honey represent a level of kitchen ambition unusual for a city this size. Locals consider it the go-to for a proper meal out, and the bar program is better than anything else on the street.
Bank 253
A converted historic bank building on 2nd Street that is Pikeville's top lunch and late-night spot, serving a menu that spans calamari, wings, club sandwiches, burgers, and proper dinner entrees like bacon-wrapped meatloaf and salmon. The bread pudding has its own following. The preserved banking hall decor — high ceilings, original teller windows — makes it one of the more atmospheric rooms in eastern Kentucky.
Trails & outdoors
Real McCoy Trail
Pikeville's most ambitious trail, a 4.7-mile strenuous loop through Bob Amos Park that climbs Peach Orchard Mountain — the very mountain the McCoy family traversed during the feud years — with 833 feet of total ascent and rope-assist sections on the steepest slopes. Opened in 2022, it immediately became the most talked-about hike in town and put Pikeville on the trail map in a way that surprised even locals. The views from the top across the city's cut-through and the surrounding ridgelines are exceptional.
Peach Orchard Mountain Trail
A 2-mile moderate hike in Bob Amos Park ascending Peach Orchard Mountain — historically significant as land the McCoy family knew well during the feud era — with 465 feet of elevation gain and views across the Pikeville valley. Less demanding than the Real McCoy Trail and a good introduction to the park's terrain before attempting the longer route. The park's well-maintained infrastructure makes it the most user-friendly trail in the area.
Things to do
Hillbilly Days Festival
One of the largest events in eastern Kentucky, an annual April festival in downtown Pikeville that celebrates Appalachian heritage with live country and bluegrass music, a parade down Main Street, arts and crafts vendors, and food. The festival draws tens of thousands of attendees and has a genuinely irreverent spirit about the "hillbilly" identity that the mountain culture has long embraced with pride. It is the party Pikeville throws for itself each spring.
Hatfield-McCoy Feud Heritage Tour (Bus)
A guided bus tour that covers the key Hatfield-McCoy feud sites across Pike County with a narrated history from local guides who grew up with the story. The air-conditioned coach makes the 50-mile driving tour accessible even in midsummer heat and the guides bring a personal dimension to the history that a self-guided map cannot provide. It is the most efficient way to see all the major sites in a single afternoon.
Landmarks & sights
Pikeville Cut-Through Overlook
The most audacious engineering project in Kentucky's history, a 1973–1987 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers effort that literally moved a mountain, rerouted the Big Sandy River, and relocated a four-lane highway and railroad to free the town of Pikeville from catastrophic flooding. At the time of completion, 18 million cubic yards of earth had been moved — more than any project except the Panama Canal. The Bob Amos Drive overlook gives you the full scale of the cut from above.
Hatfield & McCoy Historic Sites
A self-guided driving tour across Pike County visiting the actual locations of the world's most famous family feud — the McCoy Homeplace, the Hog Trial Cabin where the feud's legal origins played out, and multiple graves, wells, and historic markers that bring the 1880s conflict vividly to life. Randall McCoy and his family lived in Pikeville after the feud's violence drove them from Blackberry Creek, and the town is saturated with their history.