Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:04:00

The beef stew recipe is from the early seventies and the jam bands never stop - Indy's north side has been fed and entertained on this corner since 1957. The Mousetrap at 5565 North Keystone Avenue in Indianapolis is one of the city's oldest watering holes, built at the southeast corner of 56th and Keystone and run through incarnations from cajun restaurant to pool hall while remaining, at heart, a neighborhood pub. The bar's modern identity is musical: concentrating on jam bands, the Trap has hosted Midwest heroes from Groovatron and the Twin Cats on up, becoming the state's definitive room for improvisational rock. The weekly rhythm is an institution in itself - a Sunday bluegrass open session hosted by Flatland Harmony Experiment, Tuesday jazz built around Indianapolis Jazz Hall of Famers, the Wednesday Family Jam of the city's best players in freestyle format, and Altered Thurzdaze of touring electronic and dubstep acts, with headline jam bills on Fridays and Saturdays. The room holds about 200 under a strictly casual dress code, with five pool tables, dart boards, twenty TVs and a kitchen slinging hand-patted burgers, breaded tenderloins and the famous John's stew. In warm weather the music spills onto the deck for grill-out Sunday sessions, and the crowd is the bar's calling card - a genuinely mixed room of players, regulars and pool sharks that the house celebrates as its great diversity. Open from morning until deep past midnight every day of the week, the Trap runs on the economics no promoter can fake: cheap drinks, good food and musicians who treat the stage as a clubhouse. Nearly seventy years in, the Mousetrap remains what Indianapolis calls it - the city's favorite music bar - a title earned one Wednesday jam at a time. The Trap's role in the Midwest jam ecosystem is generational: bands that packed the corner stage in the 2000s now send their proteges, the Thursday electronic series has run long enough to have alumni of its own, and the bar's calendar functions as the connective tissue between Indianapolis' jazz, bluegrass and jam scenes that otherwise rarely share a room.