Making a Home at Elita
Chef Rocky Serber’s long road to opening her butcher shop and specialty market in Aurora, Colorado.
Rocky Serber spent years searching for an opportunity that felt just right. It took until 2020, the year she signed a lease on a space located within Aurora, Colorado’s Stanley Marketplace. Now a Mexican-Mediterranean-inflected Butcher shop and specialty market, Elita is an accumulation of Serber’s life story.
Chef rocky seber | photos: Will Blunt
Serber’s father, an American Jewish man, fell in love with her mother on the beaches of Mexico. Serber was born in San Diego, but most of her childhood was spent back in Mexico, where her mother was from. But by the time Serber turned 7 years old, her mother had passed away from breast cancer. Her father sent Serber to live with family friends around the country, including her father’s ex-wife, “Aunt Irene.” As a way of connecting with her hosts, she learned how to cook. “I smelled my Aunt Irene cooking mushrooms with harissa and grabbed a chair, then repeated that at every home I went to,” says Serber. “That was my currency. When you’re living with a family that isn’t yours, you need an in with them. I may not be your kid, but I can cook for you!”
She settled in Los Angeles with Aunt Irene, spending most of her time with her next door neighbor, an Israeli man who owned a nearby clothing business. “I became part of their family,” she says. “He drew up the adoption papers and had a confrontation with my father, and said, ‘You’re going to sign these papers—this is my kid.’” At 16 years old, Serber got a job working at a local French restaurant. “That was my first dip into the culinary world, and from that moment, I started looking for culinary schools.”
Serber moved to Denver to study at Johnson & Wales University, and as soon as she graduated, she followed her adopted father to Israel. After a year spent learning Hebrew and working at some of Tel Aviv’s top restaurants, Serber and her father launched a Mexican catering company. The business was hugely successful, giving Serber the opportunity to understand what type of leader she wanted and didn’t want to be. “I could see the differences between the way I would run a business and the way my dad would,” she says. “He was cut-throat, and I’m about food and people.” So six years later, Serber sold the catering company and returned to the Mile High City.
butcher case at elita
butcher case at elita
Bone-In Ribeye, Rosemary, Thyme, and Chile Flakes, Brown Sugar with Baba Ganoush, CHipotle hummus, and pits chips
She found a job at Three Tomatoes Catering, a company she had worked for in college. But with a growing interest in butchery, she moved on to become the general manager at a butcher shop. In 2018, Serber joined the opening team of the Israeli restaurant Safta, alongside Rising Stars alum Alon Shaya. “He reawakened my love of cooking again,” she says. “[I was] just a line cook on the sauté station, just moving ass and having so much fun.” One day, she received a phone call asking if she wanted to run the Juniper Pig, a German-style butcher shop at the Stanley Marketplace. “It was kismet times ten.”
After just a few months, the owner asked if Serber wanted to become his business partner. Instead, she bought him out. “I negotiated it with him to the death and got a very low price for a very good business,” she says. “The day I signed the paperwork was the day everything shut down.” The COVID-19 pandemic may have slowed down the action, but she made it work. She continued making sausage and cutting meat, gradually figuring out how she would make the shop her own. She decided to keep it personal: “An expression of my love of Mexico and Israel, and their bright flavors that are almost like cousins.” There would still be a focus on butchery, but with more mindfulness when it comes to sourcing local. She kicked the accessibility-level up a notch, selling vacuum-sealed, pre-marinated, ready-to-cook meats. She expanded the food menu, offering hot sandwiches and plated dishes that resonates with her heritage, like al pastor hummus bowls and a lamb merguez flatbread with salsa tatemada. “This place was built to be a boutique butcher, and the hot food has taken off way more than the butchery side.”
Elita is home to Serber—a place where she can finally run a business the way she’s always dreamed of, and a place where she can create a home for her guests and employees alike. Cooking no longer has to be a form of currency for her. “I have a love affair with food and making people happy with it,” she says. “It’s not necessarily about food, it’s about the people. I focus on just giving people a place to be comfortable, every day.”
