Young Avenue Deli sits at the heart of the Cooper-Young neighborhood, serving as the area's living room for over two decades. The bar is large by Cooper-Young standards, with a sizable outdoor patio that fills up on warm evenings, a rotating selection of draft beers that skews local and regional, and a kitchen that produces better-than-bar food — the fried pickles and the burgers are both worth ordering. Live music several nights a week, ranging from local acts to touring bands.
The crowd is Midtown: a mix of neighborhood residents, young professionals, and regulars who have been coming since the 1990s. It is a genuinely local bar in a city where genuinely local bars are worth knowing about. The patio is the best place to be on a spring or autumn evening; in summer the ceiling fans inside make the place bearable.