Tangier West and Isabella's Restaurant Open Doors in Fairlawn

The black and white floor in the ballroom still smelled faintly of sealant on the morning before opening. Angelica George walked its edges slowly, checking sightlines from the patio doors, adjusting a chair here, a place setting there, the way someone does when a room is about to stop being a construction site and start being a business. Nearby, in the front of the building, a translucent sign caught the light from a window overlooking West Market Street. It read simply Isabella's, in a script chosen, she said later, to feel like something handwritten rather than manufactured.

By Tuesday morning, August 25, that room would open to the public as Tangier West, a 12,000 square foot event space with a 200 person ballroom, a boardroom, and a restaurant called Isabella's Cocktail Lounge and Restaurant tucked into the front of the building. It sits inside a Holiday Inn Express across from Summit Mall in Fairlawn, Ohio, in a space that had most recently been known as Bricco before that restaurant closed earlier this year.

A Name Chosen with Care

The restaurant's name was not a marketing decision. Isabella was Angelica George's grandmother, a woman who worked in accounting at the original Tangier well into her nineties and who, by family account, ran a tight kitchen in her own right. "She was tough, tough, very regimented," Angelica said of her, a description delivered with the particular fondness people reserve for relatives whose sternness they only came to appreciate later.

Isabella's own path into the business began unusually late. Her son, Ed George, recalled that she started working at The Tangier in her seventies, after raising eight children. "My mom was great. She had eight kids, plus grandkids and great grandkids," he said. "After raising eight kids, that was a great business. She loved to be around people." The image of a woman entering the restaurant trade in her seventies, and thriving in it for two decades, sits at the emotional center of what the family has built into this new location.

What the Building Used to Be, and What It Became

The Tangier name carries considerable weight in Akron, where the original venue opened on East Exchange Street in 1948 before a fire forced a move to West Market Street in 1959. For twenty five years afterward, by Ed George's account, the club was a fixture of the national entertainment circuit. "We had every entertainer. I can't believe it when I think back about my life. I had those entertainers so cheap. When I opened, my first weekend, we had Tina Turner, Ray Charles and Natalie Cole. And all of them under ten thousand dollars for a small room," he said. "It was just the time when entertainers would go on tour on a bus. That's over now."

That original 60,000 square foot complex was sold to the LeBron James Family Foundation six years ago and now operates as House Three Thirty, though the George family retained the Tangier name for future use. Tangier West, in that sense, is less a spinoff than a continuation, a way of keeping a name in circulation that had otherwise gone quiet with the sale of its original home.

Inside the New Room

Where the original Tangier was known for its grand circular dining room, a photograph of which now hangs near the entrance of Isabella's, the new space trades scale for intimacy. The restaurant's menu leans Mediterranean, drawing heavily from the 1975 menu of the earlier Tangier incarnation, paired with a craft cocktail program at the adjoining lounge. Chef Glenn Gillespie, previously of Edgar's at Good Park Golf Course before that restaurant closed in April, now leads the kitchen. "It's mostly Mediterranean food, just like our restaurant was," Angelica said of the approach, a line that reads less like a pitch than a simple statement of continuity.

The ballroom itself is built for scale rather than intimacy, anchored by that black and white centerpiece floor and connected to a patio meant for cocktail hours and overflow seating. A thirty person room for smaller private groups is still being finished. "We redid the whole place," Angelica said of the transformation from Bricco's former footprint, a renovation she completed roughly six weeks after signing the lease.

The Business Behind the Ballroom

Tangier West is not George's first venture into event space management, and understanding it requires understanding the small portfolio she has built around it. She also operates a ballroom at Our Lady of the Cedars Maronite Church in Fairlawn, Trailhead at Cascade Lofts in Akron, connected to Lock 15 Brewing Co., and a renovated Goodyear Bank building in Akron's East End. Tangier West is the only property among them with a full restaurant attached.

Weddings dominate the business model. "We really go after a wedding market," George said. "I would say seventy percent of our business is weddings. We do over a hundred a year." That figure situates Tangier West within a broader trend in the events industry, where standalone venues increasingly compete not just on square footage but on the ability to house both a ceremony and its reception under one roof, along with a kitchen capable of running both a plated dinner and a full bar simultaneously.

Two Generations in the Same Room

Ed George, 87, insists his role now is mostly ceremonial, though he does not entirely believe it himself. "I'm done. Sixty five years I was in the business, isn't that enough? Here she gets me roped back in to do the work without pay," he said, laughing. "But she's great. She does a great job." He described the particular restlessness of retirement in blunter terms. "The worst part about life when you get old, you want to retire, then you retire, then what? I'm almost happy she's back in the business. I'm back down in action again. I'm 87."

For her part, Angelica describes Tangier West as a natural stopping point rather than a launchpad for further expansion. "I think I'm done. This is enough," she said, a rare note of finality from someone who has opened four distinct event properties in recent years.

What the Name Still Means in Akron

For longtime residents, the reopening of the Tangier name carries a weight that a newcomer might miss entirely. "A lot of people remember the Tangier, and a lot of people are happy we're back in business," Ed George said. "We were such a rock in this city for so long." It is the kind of sentence that only makes sense in a city where a nightclub closed decades ago can still function as a shared point of reference among strangers.

The restaurant industry in Northeast Ohio, like much of the country, has spent recent years absorbing rising costs, shifting labor markets, and a wedding sector still recalibrating after years of postponed and rescheduled events. Against that backdrop, a family choosing to lean on an existing name, an existing recipe archive, and an existing reputation, rather than building an entirely new brand from nothing, represents one recognisable strategy for managing risk in a difficult operating environment.

What Stays the Same

By evening on opening day, the photograph near Isabella's entrance, showing Ed George, his parents and Tangier staff inside the original club's circular dining room around 1965, will have been seen by more strangers than family members for the first time. It is a small detail, easy to walk past on the way to a table, yet it anchors the entire building to something older than its lease.

What Tangier West ultimately represents is not a reinvention but a careful act of continuity, a family choosing to carry a name, a menu and a set of relationships forward rather than starting over. Whether that continuity proves as durable as the original Tangier's quarter century run remains, as with any new opening, a question only time and repeat guests can answer. For now, the room is full, the floor is finished, and a grandmother's name is on the wall.

More information is available on the official website at thetangier.com. Further reading on the restaurant industry is available at hospitalitycareerprofile.com.