A gourmet grocery well done: beloved Tony's market started as one-man butcher shop.

• Author: Taylor, Mike

Tony's Meats was born in 1978 shortly after Tony Rosaeci and his 13-year-old son Daniel passed a shuttered 7-Eleven on East Dry Creek Road in what is now Centennial.

"Boy," said Daniel., that'd be a good place for a butcher shop, Dad."

A few days later Tony Rosacci, who to that point had spent most of his 38 years cutting meat or managing some one else's meat departments in Detroit, Los Angeles and Denver, wrote a postdated check to secure a lease on the storefront with money he didn't have, thinking * hoping the bank would approve of his business plan and give him a loan. When the hank turned him down, he sold his house put it up for sale on a Friday and sold it two days later -- to come up with $1,300 for the first and last month's r Dent on the shuttered 7-Eleven. Tony's Meats w as in business.

"I was very optimistic," Tony Rosacci says 33 years later. "Our first goal was to do S1,000 a day, and we did that like the second week we were in business."

Explaining this confidence, the 71-year-old Rosacci says, "Well, I was younger then. I was motivated. I mean, I would cut the meat, I waited on the customers, I started at 5 or 6 in the morning and I got home at 8 o'clock at night. Anybody in this country can do anything they want, but their ems a price to pay. And if you're willing to pay the price, you can do it. If you're not, Pm sorry."

Today the business now known as Tony's Market has grown to four stores and is known throughout Denver for its meats, seafood and produce, along with deli, bakery and catering operations. Tony Rosacci's Fine Catering feeds, among others, the Denver Broncos every day during the football season, and the Tony's Market on 950 Broadway boasts a bistio o with wine and beer.

But Rosacci says the growth hasn't been spurred by any pivotal developments. Rather, he says. "When you have three kids in the business and they all want to make good many and they're all hard workers ... you have to grow." The product expansion, he says, has been merely the result of listening in what customers want and Providing it.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

At any given time, depending on the season, there are eight to 10 Rosacci family members spanning three generations working among the 275 employees of "Tony's Market key among them are son Daniel Rosacci 17, the GEC): son N Rosacci, 52. corporate chef, and daughter. Avie Rosacci. 51, business development officer.

"There's nothing hewn than to realize your dream and then to see your kids carry on with the business, and you heat the Wings that you taught them taken to We next level," Tom. says.

Those key principles clearly have been passed down. CEO Daniel Rosacci calls his lather-probably one of the greatest entrepreneurs t his state's had" and says that foremost, "My dad knows how to take care of customers. and he instilled that in us so heavily as children that it still is our Inundation: If we don't take care of those customers, we have nothing."

Tony Rosacci talks passionately about his edlICati011 in business. Not college. which he eschewed. hilt the one he received grow Bing up in the inner city of Detroit Raised primarily by his immigrant grand-patents while his single mother was working at a ball-bearing plant for Ford Motor Go., he started working in a corner grocery store at age 9.

"It was three kicks a week, and I thought. 'Man!' Rosacci says. He laughs. And I gave $2 of it to my mom."

On his office wall in Centennial, along with photos of Frank Sinatra and Muhammed All and an iconic Norman Rockwell painting of a butcher-shop scene, at framed immigration records of his maternal grandparents and the ships they arrived on from Italy separately before they were mat riled Michelangelo Vitale in 1903 and Paula Benedetto in 1909. The handwritten records show Vitale listed his occupation as "thriller," that lie couldn't read or write, and that he arrived with $12 to his name.

"He's the one who taught me how to work." Rosacci says. "He worked from sun up to sun down."

Tony Rosacci took that lesson well. His description of his early years is one long, joyously told description of jobs and youthful moneymaking schemes.

"I was a street kid," he says. -It was a very Italian neighborhood. In order to get ahead, you didn't watch TV. You had to go out and hustle. And I hustled. I sold balloons at every Mac's Parade I used to stay up all night blowing up balloons to sell them. I used to sell cufflinks to old people in the bowling alley. I'd buy them down at the wholesale house Igor a buck and a quarter and sell them for four bucks a pair. I had newspaper routes. I worked downtown in Detroit in a bookie joint, the Inuit end of a newsstand. making 75 cents an how. And it's not even the money. It's the idea that, 'Man, I did something not many people could have done, and I made money at it.' And it's fun! To have something in your mind and out hustle somebody. Because life is competition."

Rosacci tries to impart the lesson of hard work on...