- May 22, 2026
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Lakewood Ranch restaurant owner Zach Zeller and his wife, Jessica, have an all-time great first date story. It goes heavy on alligators and airplanes, with a dose of aw shucks meant-to-be.
It started in Daytona about 15 years ago. That’s where Zeller, a licensed pilot, rented a plane.
He flew to the private side of Sarasota Bradenton International Airport, where local resident Jessica McKelvie, his date, awaited. They had connected over matchmaking website eHarmony, and this was their first date. “Some of her friends were joking with her,” recalls Zeller, “like ‘why would you get on some guy’s plane?’”
“But she thought it was just like if he picked me up in a car,” Zeller recalls his then unknown bride-to-be countered.
After the stop at SRQ, the two flew on to the Everglades, where Zeller had an airboat for the day and they went out for a ride among the gators. “We just had a blast,” Zeller says, “and we both knew it was just meant to be.”
Today the couple, married 12 years, has an elementary school-aged daughter. They live in Panther Ridge, just off State Road 70 in east Manatee County, near both The Concession and several extended family members. Jessica Zeller is a nurse practitioner at a pediatric practice in Parrish. Zach Zeller, meanwhile, co-owns three popular Lakewood Ranch Main Street eateries: The Peculiar Pub, Twisted Pit BBQ and Percoco’s Pizza & Pasta. Zeller splits his time between the restaurants, with, he says, no typical day other than putting out proverbial fires.
Zeller, too, is a bit of a paradox. At 42, he owns three restaurants. Flies planes. Built a multimillion-dollar business in his 30s and sold it in a stroke of terrific timing months before the pandemic. With that intel, and the first date story, it would be easy to think Zeller carries a big ego, that he’s the kind of “brah” who throws around his successes.
That would be wrong.
Zeller is, instead, Midwest nice, almost to a fault, say people who know him well. For one, he’s volunteered to fly dozens of flights for people in need, from hurricane recovery zones in Jamaica and Puerto Rico to medical flights for Angel Flight Southeast. Also, spend 90 minutes asking Zeller about his life, and he will often humbly defer to others — save for one thing he does have a bit of an ego about: talking about how he’s never been hesitant to outwork anyone.
“I’m 57 years old,” says one of his best friends and fly buddies, Indianapolis-based electrical engineering design firm executive Brian Inskeep, “and I know a lot of people. Zach is one of the best people I’ve ever met.”
Zeller grew up in Indiana, the son of a U.S. Air Force aircraft mechanic.
His first job, when he was 14, was with an Ace Hardware store, and then next an AutoZone. “I loved to work,” he says, quickly adding there was a wallet-filling purpose, too. “I needed to be able to do the things that I wanted to do. I loved cars.”
Road machines soon gave way to flying machines. Zeller took his first flying lesson at 16. He was hooked. “I started trading my paycheck for flying lessons.”
Asked why, after 25 years in the cockpit, Zeller maintains a love for flying, he smiles and leans back. “I get to go out to an airport, jump on a plane and then the sky is literally the limit. It’s Zen. You are not thinking about anything that’s going on but flying the plane safely.”
Planes cost more than cars, so Zeller pursued a business where he could make bigger money. His first idea: flipping houses. On the advice of his dad, he bought the worst home he could find in the best neighborhood where he lived at the time. That was in Terre Haute, Indiana. He bought a property for $38,000, he says, fixed it up and sold it for a tidy profit.
He used that profit to buy into an air charter business in French Lick, Indiana, flying people back and forth to a casino. He was paid in a percentage of what his passengers spent on gambling.
By the time Zeller was 22, some of those well-heeled passengers had gotten to know him, and they helped him buy a plane so he could launch his own charter business. That business did well, then came to a halt in the 2008-2009 recession, when, says Zeller, the “flying industry basically collapsed.”
Zeller knew he had to shift to something else. His next idea? Mobile oil changes.
It sounded good on paper, he thought: go to the customer to take care of a necessary, but tedious, car maintenance task. Good concept, difficult execution. He named the business Your Location Lubrication — a name, says Inskeep, they came up with while brainstorming on, where else, a plane ride. “We were flying from Indianapolis to Kenosha, Wisconsin to go to an Italian market,” Inskeep says.
Plane rides, incidentally, are where Zeller often comes up with his best ideas. “I’ve heard a lot of his stupid ideas over and over and over on plane rides all over the country,” Inskeep quips, “but that’s just the way his brain works. He just sticks with it and sticks with it. He can’t stop his brain from thinking about these things.”
The first version of Your Location Lubrication was in Indianapolis, but, says Zeller, was “really complicated driving all around the city and very unprofitable.”
Zeller moved to Orlando, thinking a tourism hotbed has a lot of potential oil change customers in the rental car sector. That part was true. Proving the concept, though, took a lot of time, hustle and recovering from mistakes, he learned. “I was doing everything in the business. The marketing, driving the van, doing the oil changes,” he says. “Every day, I went out in my van. Some days it felt like 24 hours a day we were doing oil changes.”
The effort paid off. “Zach has grit,” Inskeep says, “and he has no quit.”
YLL landed Enterprise Rent-A-Car as a client. That was a tipping point. It grew into a multimillion-dollar company with several hundred employees and locations nationwide from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine. The company made the Inc. magazine 5000 list five times for fast growth and then, in 2019, Zeller settled on an exit strategy: He sold YLL to North Carolina-based on-demand vehicle detailer Get Spiffy. The deal closed four months before Covid shut the world down. “I count my blessings every day that I was fortunate enough to get out when we did,” says Zeller.
That deal is what brought Zeller to the Lakewood Ranch area. He and Jessica lived in Hillsborough County for a bit, then settled into Panther Ridge.
Zeller met Evan Percoco in Lakewood Ranch and the pair became friends. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, Percoco worked at the restaurants until recently, when he stepped away for a break, says Zeller; they remain business partners.
Under the name EZ Restaurant Group, they opened a barbecue popup at Crowder Plaza in Lakewood Ranch during the pandemic. Then, in 2023 they bought Peculiar Pub on Lakewood Ranch Main Street, with both saying they believed the retail-dining-entertainment block had untapped potential. They added the two other places in 2024 and have been in tweak and adapt mode the past 18 months.
One misstep, Zeller says, has been Twisted Pit BBQ. The down-home, counter service, picnic-style concept has underperformed, Zeller says — so much so plans were underway in mid-May to shutter Twisted Pit and move Peculiar Pub into that spot, taking the EZ portfolio down to two Main Street locations. Zeller says they will add a billiards table and other games to the new Peculiar Pub.
“We really missed the mark on it,” he says of Twisted Pit. “We didn’t realize how big a risk it was.”
“Lakewood Ranch,” he adds, “doesn’t want to stand in line. They don’t want to sit on picnic benches. Lakewood Ranch doesn’t want plastic cups and they don’t want to be served on trays.”
Zeller estimates he and his partners have spent some $4 million on buying and updating the Main Street restaurants. He’s confident the investment will pay off given how much Lakewood Ranch is growing. That, and his ability to find success a variety of ways.
“I didn’t know anything about the restaurant business,” he says, when he got into this, “but I know a lot about working with people and dealing with people. And I know a lot about customers.”
