Morso rising Under the Sun

BOULDER — Hosea Rosenberg and Lauren Feder Rosenberg, the husband and wife duo behind local restaurants Blackbelly and Santo, are preparing to open Morso, an Italian-American restaurant in the former Under the Sun space in South Boulder.

Rosenberg, who won Season 5 of “Top Chef” and used the prize money to help launch Blackbelly, said the restaurant is expected to open in June.

The space at 627A S. Broadway had previously been operated by Kevin Daly’s Mountain Sun restaurant group, and Rosenberg said their friendship with Daly helped make the opportunity possible. The former Under the Sun space also gave the Rosenbergs a large kitchen, good parking and a neighborhood they believed could support another restaurant.

 “This is a hungry neighborhood,” Rosenberg said. “There’s a lot of people in South Boulder, and I don’t believe there are enough restaurants to support them. A lot of diners end up downtown or at our other locations because there are just limited choices on this side of town.”

Rosenberg said they had already been considering Spanish cuisine and other Mediterranean ideas.

“When we came and looked at the space, it just felt like a really smart and almost obvious move to do an Italian eatery here,” he said. “This big wood burning pizza oven was already in place, and it’s the kind of food that I feel like it’s just so easy to get behind.”

Italian roots and building on Blackbelly’s bread program

Morso’s menu will lean into pizza, house-made pasta and Italian-American red-sauce dishes, including chicken, eggplant and shrimp parmesan.

The cuisine connects to the Rosenbergs’ family backgrounds. Feder Rosenberg grew up just outside of New York City in New Jersey, where she quips that the “chicken parm was a little cheaper but just as good!” She lived in Manhattan for more than a decade, and her parents and Rosenberg’s father’s side of the family are from New York. Several members of the team also share similar connections to Italian-American food. “We all get it,” she said.

The pizza program also builds on work already underway at Blackbelly. Over the past several years, the company has expanded its use of locally milled grains and developed a substantial bread program. Blackbelly now operates a full bakery producing multiple varieties of bread each day, sourcing flour from Boulder-based mill and bakery Dry Storage and Moxie Bread Co., Louisville.

“We’ve been messing around with naturally fermented pizza dough for a couple years, really just toying around with it,” he said. “If you have really quality dough, you’re going to have really quality pizza.”

Rosenberg said naturally fermented dough is similar to sourdough, with a more complex flavor. It takes longer to make but it produces dough that is easier to digest for some people. 

“You’re also utilizing the natural wild yeasts that are present in the air, and that gives you something really special,” he said.

Morso will have a robust bar program featuring Italian-inspired cocktails, including Negronis and spritzes, as well as imported and domestic wines. The company has also invested in an espresso maker. “You can’t do this kind of food without a good cup of espresso,” Rosenberg said.

The company also plans to sell pasta, private-label olive oil and other products.

From dark brewpub to brighter dining room

The Rosenbergs signed the lease for the roughly 5,000-square-feet space last June and spent several months working through the design before entering the permitting process. The team also had to address issues uncovered during the renovation.

The kitchen did not require as much work because the hood system, walk-in cooler and pizza oven were already in place.

Most of the work focused on the dining room. “We all agree that the space felt very cavernous and dark,” Rosenberg said. “It was just one big room, and so we felt it was really important, physically, to sort of break the space up.”The redesigned space includes an island bar, a private dining room separated by a glass partition and built-in banquettes.

“Lauren picked out the most fabulous tile, so we have really cool design elements, and the place is going to feel a lot brighter and lighter and more feminine in design than what was here prior,” he said.

Several Boulder companies were involved in the project: Maliakai Architecture, Rachel B Interiors, Duggan Construction and Berger & Föhr Design. 

Building a restaurant group

Rosenberg worked in restaurants throughout high school while growing up in Taos, New Mexico, and continued working in kitchens while studying engineering physics at the University of Colorado Boulder. After graduation, he took a job with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, but decided it wasn’t for him.

He pivoted and took jobs working for restaurateurs Wolfgang Puck, Kevin Taylor and Dave Query, who encouraged him to continue learning on the job instead of going to culinary school.

In 2011, he launched Blackbelly as a boutique catering company, food truck and farm-related operation where he raised pigs on land leased from a friend. He eventually moved away from the farming side after realizing he could not be both chef and farmer at the same time, but that early experience shaped the company’s continued focus on sourcing.

In 2014, Blackbelly opened a brick-and-mortar restaurant at 1606 Conestoga St. in east Boulder after Rosenberg found a large space that could support catering and a restaurant. In 2016, Backbelly expanded operations, opening a butcher shop and market next door. In 2017, he opened Santo at 1265 Alpine Ave. in Boulder, followed in 2024 by Blackbelly Market Denver.

Many of the same private investors helped support Blackbelly, Santo and Morso, Feder Rosenberg said.

As the business has grown, Rosenberg has stepped farther back from daily cooking and relies on chefs who have been with the company for years.

“We really lean on our day-to-day team to execute night after night,” Feder Rosenberg said.

Feder Rosenberg came to the business from publishing, advertising and restaurant marketing. In New York, she worked in advertising and ad sales for various publications under the Time Inc. umbrella before attending the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan and helping friends open a bar in SoHo. She later moved to Denver, where she worked with chef Lon Symensma and helped Josh Pollack launch marketing efforts for Rosenberg’s Bagels and Delicatessen (no relation).

She met Hosea Rosenberg at the Aspen Food & Wine Classic while helping Rosenberg’s Bagels with events. Blackbelly was about six months old when they met and she now serves as director of communication for the company.

Feder Rosenberg also founded Sophie’s Neighborhood after the couple’s daughter was diagnosed with multicentric carpotarsal osteolysis syndrome, or MCTO, a rare genetic disease, shortly before her third birthday. The diagnosis came during the same week COVID-19 shut down restaurants.

With little information available and no treatment plan, she created a website, registered a nonprofit, connected with researchers and began building a scientific advisory board.

The foundation has funded collaborators working to better understand the disease and explore potential treatment approaches. Feder Rosenberg said support from friends in the restaurant industry has helped make that work possible.

“It certainly did help being in the business and having friends that will help us with the fundraisers and make contributions of food and their own efforts in order to fundraise,” she said.

Expanding in a difficult market

Morso is opening at a time when many independent restaurants face economic headwinds. Yet Rosenberg said Blackbelly and Santo both posted record sales last year and are ahead of those numbers so far in 2026, giving the company confidence to move forward with another concept.

The company has benefited from a strong stable of longtime employees, as well as products people want and diversification, especially at Blackbelly, Rosenberg said. The restaurants offer different price points, and he noted that the company tries to remain nimble as customers change how they spend.

“It’s a relationship,” he said. “I think of it as a relationship that we have with the customer base.”

Feder Rosenberg said growth does not eliminate the uncertainty that comes with operating a restaurant. In addition to food, restaurant owners must manage staffing, bookkeeping, data and countless day-to-day operational details. She said the company constantly monitors the business and makes adjustments when one area becomes vulnerable.

“We never take any of it for granted,” she said.

Because many restaurant employees live outside of the city and commute, the high cost of housing also remains a challenge in Boulder. Feder Rosenberg said more affordable housing and improved public transportation would help businesses attract and retain workers.

Restaurants also continue to feel the effects of drought, pressures on agriculture and cattle production, supply-and-demand shifts, tariffs and rising import costs. She also said increased regulation, taxes, minimum-wage hikes and other expenses have made it more difficult for independent operators to maintain already-thin margins.

Larger operators are often better positioned to absorb those costs, she added, which contributes to the growth of large chain operations in Boulder.

“It becomes extremely tight to be able to operate when you have such small margins to begin with,” she added.

Nevertheless, these challenges have not diminished the couple’s belief in Boulder.

“Boulder is amazing. We know that people want good, thoughtful food, and we want to be able to continue to provide that,” Feder Rosenberg said. “That’s why we work so hard and keep going.”

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