Isaac Hunter’s Oak City Tavern is returning to downtown Raleigh.

Zack Medford said Monday that Isaac Hunter’s Oak City Tavern will open at 5 p.m. Friday in the former Common 414 bar at 414 Fayetteville St. Common 414, a craft cocktail bar, has been closed for two weeks and undergoing renovations.

Medford and his business partners opened Isaac Hunter’s Tavern at 112 Fayetteville St. in 2009 but closed it in 2014. They moved on to other projects, including Paddy O’Beers, Coglin’s and Common 414.

After Tir na nOg closed last year, Medford said he and his partners felt they should bring Issac Hunter’s Tavern back. (The bar is named for the original Isaac Hunter’s Tavern, where the state legislature is said to have selected Raleigh as the site of North Carolina’s capital in 1787.) “Downtown needs a good neighborhood bar,” Medford said.

Fans of Medford’s previous Isaac Hunter’s Tavern will recognize the new 3,000-square-foot space, outfitted with old wood timbers from a barn outside Waynesboro and filled with games, like shuffleboard, darts and table games. The bar will have a extensive bourbon selection as well as other liquors, craft beer and wine.

The bar will host a grand opening on April 1 — two years from when the former tavern closed — and the space will be in transition as renovations continue. But Medford said they wanted to open sooner rather than later. “Over the next few weeks, it will get better and better,” Medford said.

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“I think Common 414 is a way to take cocktail culture and make it more approachable,” says Medford. “And we’re a place that costs $2,000 or $4,000 to rent. A lot of times we do events with just the bar tab minimum. Nowhere in Raleigh do you get a find like that, where you can come in a space this big and has this sophisticated an offering and say, ‘You know what? I wanna have my cocktail hour here!"

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"As locals to a cap city in constant limbo, teetering on the edge of a humble history and a booming up-build, sometimes we crave a relic of our roots—a regard for that space from where we came. And sometimes, we really do just wanna go where everybody knows our name.

Enter quintessential Raleigh sip spot Isaac Hunter’s Oak City Tavern, etched faithfully on the Capitol-end of Fayetteville Street by a trio of self-made late-twenty to early-thirty-somethings—Ben Yannessa, Zack Medford and Brad Bowles—who built their bar on a dream, a hard-earned dollar and a decade-plus of tavern-esque training, from pounding the pavement at local poolside snack bars to cookin’ up cocktails at cross-coast pubs.

Florida-born, 31-year-old Yannessa shaped his heady hospitality know-how hocking lemonade and turkey legs at a Florida renaissance fest at the ripe age of 13, before making the move to Raleigh two years later. Traversing his new turf’s terrain, he went to Appalachian State University in Boone, before trekking eastward and back westward again. In Wilmington, he began to wrangle the rotgut ropes at a Hilton with basics like vodka tonics, before bouncing back to Boone for a few years and earning his bar-biz stripes at Blowing Rock's Six Pence Pub. He then made the fortuitous return to Raleigh in 2003, landing at Fox & Hound, where he doled drinks to sport-savvy fans for more than five years, until meeting Medford."