Mark Tarbell has finally chosen a name for the new restaurant he's putting into the old Chama space near The Oven, his great pizza restaurant in Belmar.
This second spot will be called Mark & Isabella.
"The name, like a good rock lyric, has no real story," he tells me (although Mark Falcone is a partner, and Tarbell also has a good friend named Isabella.) Mark & Isabella will run with an American-Italian menu, dinner only, seven nights a week, and could open by the end of the month. -- Jason
MCA Denver.
Update below:
According to reliable sources, MCA Denver will soon announce that Adam Lerner, the director of the Lab at Belmar, is to be hired as its new executive director. The MCA is supposed to have mounted an international search, so it does seem strange that the institution wound up finding Cydney Payton's successor in Lakewood, of all places. So the news, though not unexpected, is something of a disappointment.
One reason the selection isn't surprising has to do with the web
A photo-illustration from MCA Denver's website.
Ever since word leaked out that Adam Lerner, who's guided the Belmar Lab, would replace Cydney Payton as executive director of MCA Denver, many art-scene observers (me included) were concerned that he would bring his hip geegaws and trendy gimcracks to the museum, and in the process start to dumb down the place.
Wonder no more. Mosey over to the home page of the museum's web site and you'll be greeted by the image above, in which a crude drawing
MCA Denver.
Mark Falcone, head of the board at MCA Denver and the founder, former board chairman and current boardmember of the Lab at Belmar, is apparently running both not-for-profit institutions as though they were his own private business interests -- which they are not. With the announcement that Adam Lerner, the former director of the Lab (who was handpicked by Falcone for that post ), would be taking over a similar role at MCA, those "transformational" changes we've heard so much about h
