Zach Siler has managed an infectious disease lab, taught chemistry at the University of Wyoming, tended bar in the shadow of the Tetons, and once performed CPR on a stranger for 45 minutes while waiting on an ambulance that felt like it would never come. None of that, by his own account, is what led him to Brunswick. That happened almost by accident, on a detour he never meant to take.
Today, Zach has founded Brunswick Mercantile, the concept quietly transforming a 140-year-old building on Newcastle Street into something between a market, a gathering place, and a love letter to the coast he now calls home.
A Farm Kid Who Kept Moving
Zach grew up on a farm in Asheboro, North Carolina, where his family raised their own food and his mother sold pottery and handmade goods out of a small family shop. He didn’t think much of it at the time. “I thought that’s how everybody was raised,” he says.
From there, his path wandered. He started in restaurants at 14, studied musical theater in college, then made his way out to Jackson, Wyoming, bartending and guiding whitewater trips through the mountains. It was there, at a catering event, that everything shifted. A man collapsed in front of him, and Zach spent the next 45 minutes performing CPR. “It was kind of life-changing for me,” he says.
He went back to school in his late twenties, chasing a career in medicine, and eventually found himself managing a research lab developing materials for the Department of Defense and the FDA. It was meaningful work, but during COVID it also became consuming, and Zach eventually walked away, burned out and unsure what came next.
The Long Way Home
He landed in Moab, Utah, for a while, trying to reset. He never quite found the community he was looking for there. What he did find, almost by accident, was Brunswick.
He was on a cross-country drive to visit his parents when he decided to detour through town to see an old friend. He meant to stay one night. He stayed three, discovered a handful of other old friends had independently landed in Brunswick too, and drove away knowing he had found his home. He sold what he owned and moved on New Year’s Eve, 2024.
The idea for the Mercantile came together slowly after that, through a serving job that introduced him to local farmers, a stretch of unemployment spent walking the beach and visiting farmers markets, and a solo road trip through Thomasville, Georgia, where a shop and restaurant near a local dairy farm gave him a moment of total clarity. “Something like this,” he remembers thinking. “This is what I want to create.”
One Big Idea, Five Businesses
Back in Brunswick, Zach found a building on Newcastle Street that wasn’t even for lease and eventually talked the owners into changing their minds. While exploring the space, he discovered a hidden closet with a crack of light coming through, and asked permission to knock through the wall. That conversation is where the real vision took shape: no single business could fill a space that size. It would take several, working together.
Market BQK is open now, and worth a visit this weekend. The specialty grocery and market is stocked with fresh produce, dairy, and pantry goods, alongside work from local makers and artisans, including candles and fragrances from Zach’s own Brunswick Candle Company, developed during a marathon session at a fragrance lab in Charleston.
Coffee+cream opens October 1, inspired by the bakeries of Europe. Here you’ll find homemade ice cream, coffee, and fresh-baked goods tucked between the market and the future restaurant.
PIEDMONT opens December 1, and this restaurant might be the most ambitious piece of the whole vision. The name nods to Zach’s childhood in North Carolina’s piedmont region, the fertile farmland found at the base of mountains. But the concept reaches further, celebrating piedmont regions across the globe: the Carolinas and Georgia, but also France, Spain, the Andes, and Northern Italy. Each region gets its due through the menu, with small plates built around sauces native to those areas.
The restaurant will skip reservations entirely in favor of communal seating. If you don’t see a spot, Zach’s hope is that you’ll grab a drink at the bar, wander through the market, or step outside and enjoy Queen Square while you wait.
Filling the Holes
Ask Zach what he’s really building, and the phrase that comes up again and again is filling the holes. It shows up in the choice to bake only a small batch of bread each morning so there’s room for a local bakery’s goods too, in a plan to let farmers market vendors bring their unsold Saturday goods in rather than watch them go to waste.
It shows up in how he talks about the space itself, where the coffee shop, the market, and the restaurant are meant to feel like one continuous experience, connected by wandering, by conversation, by the historic square outside where people can just sit for a while.
It even shows up in the building. The Mercantile occupies a structure that has stood on Newcastle Street since 1884, survived Brunswick’s 1898 flood, and once housed the Brunswick Yacht Club, whose initials are still pressed into the brick out front. Zach didn’t just find a building. He found one that had already been part of this community’s story for well over a century, and decided to write its next chapter.
A Dream Still Unfolding
Zach is the first to admit he isn’t thinking too far ahead right now. Construction and daily operations of Market BQK take most of what he has to give. But the dream underneath it all is a clear one: a mercantile that feels less like a new business and more like a tradition. A place people fold into their weekly rhythm for their morning coffee, their Saturday vegetables, a birthday gift, a dinner with family.
He traces that dream back to childhood memories of mountain festivals in the Carolinas, where his mother sold pottery alongside other craftspeople, bluegrass playing somewhere in the background. “There’s something about trying to bring a little life back into what was,” he says, “and reinterpret it for Brunswick today.”
Ask him what matters most, and he’ll be happy to tell you. It’s a local farmer’s produce finding its way onto a downtown shelf for the first time. It’s the artist whose work sits in the market window. It’s the neighbor who wandered in for coffee and stayed for a conversation. Zach set out to fill the holes in downtown Brunswick, and what he’s really filling them with is people: the makers, the growers, and the community that gathers because of them.
