Community profile: From dishes to development — Roaring Fork Valley real estate broker began career in uncle’s kitchen

Mike Mercatoris, a young man who worked in his uncle’s Pan-Asian restaurant around the turn of the millennium, was preparing to-go orders and listening to his headphones as the chef caught his attention.

Mercatoris took off his headphones and in broken English the cook said, “You, me, we’re going to open our own restaurant.”

“I was just thinking, ‘Okay, man,’” recalls Mercatoris, explaining that he called it off as a joke by the kitchen staff.

But head chef Ming “Henry” Zheng kept his word and almost a decade later opened the first Zheng Asian Bistro with Mercatoris in a small shopping center in El Jebel.

“We had no idea if it would work,” said Mercatoris. “But I’ve seen restaurants work in malls in Florida, so I thought we had a chance.”

The mall wasn’t their first choice. First, the couple looked at a location on the river. Their real estate agent said he could probably get them the quaint spot, but not without reservation.

“He left us standing in front of the building on the river bank for about 10 minutes on Friday at 6 p.m.,” said Mercatoris. “Maybe three people came over.”

The agent then took them to an available mall and repeated the experiment.

“About forty people showed up in 10 to 20 minutes,” Mercatoris recalled with shining eyes as he retold the story.

“I thought, ‘We can do it.'”

The Zheng Asian Bistro, which later opened a second location in Glenwood Springs, was only a stone in the Mercatoris road to commercial real estate and entrepreneurship, but more importantly, it was the first.

Vacation job

Mercatoris, 49, was born at State College in Pennsylvania, grew up near a lake, and still loves the water.

“It was my junior year in college and I was looking forward to a last summer at the lake with the boys,” he said.

Although his uncle Doug “Merc” Mercatoris, 71, offered Mike a job in Snowmass Village at Merc’s Pan-Asian restaurant Mountain Dragon, Mike initially defeated the idea.

When he got home from Mount Union University on Wednesday, Mercatoris’ father asked if he was ready for a great summer.

“I was like, ‘Yeah, I can’t wait to see everyone,’” he recalls. “My father said, ‘Great, this is your plane ticket. You’re going to Colorado on Saturday. ‘

Mercatoris’ happy laugh filled his sparsely decorated office on Thursday as he conjured up memories of his first summer in Colorado.

“You literally sent me out,” he said with a smile. “They knew I was going to make all the trouble this summer.”

Previously, Mercatoris had only visited his uncle’s house in winter for family ski trips. Having never seen the Roaring Fork Valley in the summer, he wasn’t sure what to expect.

“I mean, I just fell in love with him,” said Mercatoris. “I went back to college and majored in psychology and minor in business, then packed my things and came back as soon as possible.”

Leaving the nest

Even with his degree in the hands of Mercatoris, his uncle Merc wouldn’t just hand over his business to the young upstart.

“When he got back, I realized he could be serious about a career as a restaurateur,” said Merc. “So I started him in the kitchen, because every successful restaurateur should know his business down to the last detail.”

During Mercatoris’s time in the kitchen, he befriended Zheng, who was Merc’s chef at the age of 21.

“I don’t know if it was because we were the same age or what, but we hit it off,” said Mercatoris.

For the next eight or nine years, the two discussed plans for their own company. Mercatoris, the charismatic businessman, would work in the front and Zheng, the ambitious chef, would work in the back.

Merc and other restaurateurs from across the valley helped the two get their plans off the ground, but this was where Merc drew the line.

“I told them I wanted to be the uncle who helped with the kids, not the uncle who did the bookkeeping,” said Merc.

Mercatoris and Zheng opened Zheng “One,” as Mike called it, around 2000. Business picked up and they opened a second location in Glenwood Springs around 2007.

“We were at a point where we wanted to do more, but we were surrounded by people like us – people with their own ideas,” said Mercatoris.

Instead of expanding Zheng into more businesses, they have sought partnerships with their employees, which led to the creation of Grind and the revitalized Riviera Supper Club between 2014 and 2016, Mercatoris said.

Business was good, if not a little too good.

“I got a job,” said Mercatoris with a grin and shrugged.

Find your niche

With around two decades of experience in restaurant management and entrepreneurship, Mercatoris turned to consulting.

Instead of building new restaurants from scratch, he wanted to help others learn this. He created ZG Consulting, an ode to the two restaurants Zheng and Grind as well as a clever recollection of the license plate prefix “ZG”, which denoted a person’s local status.

During a consulting project, Mercatoris said he was approached by a friend who worked at Sotheby’s International Realty. If Mercatoris got his real estate license, he’d have a job with the company.

“After we sold the Riviera Supper Club in 2018, I had time (to follow up on property licensing),” he recalls.

Mercatoris enjoyed the work, but Sotheby’s focused on luxury residential real estate and Mercatoris discovered his interest in commercial endeavors, particularly in the hospitality industry.

“There weren’t many people in the real estate business who knew both sides of the business,” said Mercatoris. “I wrote checks for 90 employees in four restaurants and had this inside knowledge that I could use to help both tenants and landlords. I saw a niche that I could fill. “

In 2019 another friend from the valley, Krista Klees, Mercatoris Slifer, Smith and Frampton Real Estate introduced and asked if he would like to lead the company’s new commercial division.

“I’ve said yes for as long as we can think of it as a business and entrepreneurship department,” said Mike.

Next generation mentoring

Over the years, several people reached out to Mercatoris with questions about starting their own restaurant, including Altai Chuluun, who later worked with Mike Lowe to create GlenX, a co-working space and incubator.

Mercatoris followed Chuluun and Lowe’s project with interest, and after the idea was renamed Coventure, Mike said he had convinced Slifer, Smith and Frampton to support the initiative.

In a small office tucked away in a back corridor on the third floor of Coventure, a sign with Mike’s name hangs on a mostly empty bookcase.

“I work with my backpack most of the time,” he said, raising his hands over the missing decoration in the office.

Today Mercatoris conducts commercial transactions across the valley, advising and mentoring new entrepreneurs at Coventure, and helping the next generation negotiate and understand rental terms in order to avoid the pitfalls his uncle once pointed out to him.

“I think it’s up to each generation to help the next find their place in the world,” he said.

It was a long way from the lakes of his youth, but when the work day is over he still finds his way back to the water.

“When I first got to Colorado, I loved kayaking,” he said. “But now my wife and I own a Centurion wakesurfing boat. We spend every weekend on the water with our two children. “

Reporter Ike Fredregill can be reached at 970-384-9154 or by email at [email protected].