Mark Soyka redefined Miami dining and lifestyle. Take a tour of his landmarks

Mark Soyka was not a Michelin-starred chef. The visionary who grew up inside his parent’s diner in Tel Aviv, was no foodie.

When Soyka sold one of his landmark restaurants that he named after himself, he had a simple request of the new restaurant owner.

His daily bagel and coffee.

The new owner obliged, as Soyka at the time, eyes filled with tears, discussed the turnover of Soyka in late 2018 to what became the now closed Latin American restaurant Chica.

“I’m not culinary. I don’t even cook,” Soyka, who maintained ownership of the building, told the Miami Herald in 2016.

Soyka died Sept. 15 at age 82.

The restaurants he founded changed the eating evolution of Miami and Miami Beach.

News Cafe. The Van Dyke. Soyka. Andiamo Brick Oven Pizza. Segafredos. Café Roval. Cafe Cardozo.

“I’m not a cook. I’m not a chef. My job is to design the restaurant and host people to make sure they are happy,” Soyka told the Herald from inside his namesake Upper East Side landmark in 2018.

Soyka’s restaurants were known for more than the food. They had a vibe.

Nat King Cole’s younger brother Freddy Cole sang jazz upstairs in a Van Dyke loft. Cole’s autumnal baritone and his quartet transformed a corner towering building of Lincoln Road into New York’s 52nd Street if you glanced around your surroundings and dreamed as Cole provided the soundtrack. Soyka saw it first. He had the setting in mind. He just had to make it so.

Gianni Versace, the world-renowned fashion designer, was a daily regular at Soyka’s News Cafe on Ocean Drive. The venue was about three blocks from his Ocean Drive mansion.

Celebs, locals and tourists were one-and-the-same at Soyka’s hot spots. He saw to that.

“It didn’t try to be gimmicky about anything,” said Soyka of his News Cafe in a 2009 Miami Herald story.

Soyka moved to Miami in 1985 at the peak of the city’s exposure from television’s “Miami Vice” that had helped transform a fading and dying South Beach into … South Beach. His goal, he had said, was to help real estate mogul Tony Goldman renovate the crumbling island.

“Coming here from Connecticut 20 years ago, my first landlord directed me to the Van Dyke, and I was instantly smitten and I met the best jazz singers and musicians,” said Charlotte Libov, a Miami Beach-based medical writer and arts advocate. “When I found Soyka I thought it the coolest place ever and News Cafe fascinated me, with its global scope. These three places formed my cultural introduction to Miami and the Beach.”

Let’s take a tour of some of the Miami area landmarks that Soyka crafted:

The News Cafe

Versace’s last outing was his daily walk of a mere 1,600 or so feet to his favored News Cafe for his cup of coffee and the handful of magazines and newspapers he’d routinely clutch off of the restaurant’s shelves. On the steamy morning of July 15, 1997, he was murdered by an out-of-town serial killer on the steps of his South Beach home after his morning visit to the cafe.

That’s the ugliest story linked to the name of a hangout that has delighted generations since Soyka and business partner Jeffrey Davis conceived of The News Cafe in 1988. The South Beach revival was underway, in part because of preservationists’ indefatigable activism and the national exposure brought to the region by NBC’s pop culture hit “Miami Vice.” The News Cafe pushed Miami Beach to a new golden era that has outlasted its regular rises and falls.

By the early 1990s, the cafe expanded by adding a kitchen in the early 1990s, moved operations into an adjacent building and expanded the store, which carries international newspapers and cigars.

“We created a cafe, not a restaurant. There’s a difference. A cafe is a hangout, a place to have coffee, sit down and not be rushed,” Soyka, who studied at the New York School of Interior Design, told the Herald in 2009.

In 2001, Cafe Cardozo, at 1300 Ocean Dr. in Miami Beach became Soyka’s fifth restaurant after opening the nearby News Cafe. The cafe opened at the Cardozo Hotel and had the same sidewalk cafe theme.

Soyka

Soyka wanted to open a neighborhood hangout in his Morningside neighborhood as the new millennium dawned in 2000.

Using profits from the sale of the Van Dyke, Soyka, converted redesigned a four-block industrial section tucked off Biscayne Boulevard to include his signature Soyka restaurant and Andiamo Brick Oven Pizza across the street.

For Soyka, he gutted an old warehouse that he had used to store his car collection. His design school education informed the decor: exposed, rusted gold-painted metal beams and exposed wood rafters, concrete walls with an unfinished texture, an eye-catching metal chandelier, and art and antique light fixtures hovering over the restaurant’s leather banquets. Soyka bought the items from a Lincoln Road vintage dealer. Soyka’s had character. An art gallery was a hop skip from the front door.

The Peruvian ceviche was a must, a Herald food critic opined in 2004. We never skipped on the Soyka salad, which easily served two, and tantalized with its perky mustard-shallot vinaigrette, dollops of kalamata olives drizzled over mesclun greens.

“Soyka gave locals a reason to stay in the neighborhood, to invest in it. There, he opened all day, every day, adding brunch on the weekends before it was fashionable,” according to a Herald food article in 2018 when he sold the venue.

Andiamo! Brick Oven Pizza

The exclamation point in this restaurant’s title next door to Soyka off Biscayne Boulevard for more than 20 years was earned.

Soyka and his daughter Sasha co-founded their Andiamo! pizzeria in 2001 inside a 1954 glass-enclosed Mid-Century Modern Robert Law Weed structure. Before it fed the Upper East Side, the space functioned as a Standard Oil gas station and a General Tire store and repair shop.

Talk about a tastier use of oil. Andiamo means “let’s go” in Italian — and people went. Andiamo! Brick Oven Pizza was a hit with its pies and paninis for some 24 years until its 2025 closing, the same year it featured a booth at the SoBe Wine & Food Festival.

In a 2002 Herald story, food writer Ellen Kanner called the joint a place “where pizza and passion come together.” The critic, who eschewed exclamation points like most good writers do, was swayed by an earthy wild mushroom and gorgonzola pie. “Art and passion — and Andiamo pizza — are worth waiting for. Exclamation point,” Kanner wrote.

The Van Dyke

Mark Soyka and business partner Jeffrey Davis helped take the success of the News Cafe on Ocean Drive and transform a 1924 Carl Fisher building at 846 Lincoln Rd. Longtime residents may recall the place as a Lum’s restaurant hawking beer-steamed hot dogs and gooey cheeseburgers in the 1970s before being transformed into the Van Dyke in 1994.

For jazz fans who knew the music and enjoyed hearing it in proper, sophisticated settings, the Van Dyke Cafe could make you feel you were at New York’s Village Vanguard or Birdland. The jazz room, tucked near an antique bicycle serving as art decor, was on the second floor of the seven-story, 350-seat indoor and outdoor restaurant/hotel.

Upstairs at the Van Dyke, as it was known, drew jazz luminaries like Freddy Cole (Natalie’s uncle), Toots Thielemans, Randy Brecker and Branford Marsalis. The late George Wein, founder of the prestigious Newport Jazz Festival, produced his inaugural JVC Jazz Festival at the Van Dyke with performances by Gato Barbieri, Hilton Ruiz’s quartet and the Latin Jazz Crew.

Decades ago, locals like Raul Midón, Nicole Henry, Tony Fernandez and Wendy Pedersen developed as musicians here under musical director and resident bassist Don Wilner’s steady guidance. Pop singer-songwriters, local and international, including Mary Karlzen and Sophie B. Hawkins, used the Van Dyke as a backdrop to conduct press interviews to promote their latest projects in the mid-1990s.

The Van Dyke Cafe closed in 2014, driven out by skyrocketing rents and the arrival of corporate retail outlets.

Segafredo

Segafredo L’Originale, a rousing Italian-style cafe and bar that also opened at the dawn of the millennium on Lincoln Road, lasted 26 years, until May.

During its run, Segafredo was a fixture for shoppers and strollers sipping morning espressos and munching bagels and crepes; lunchtime paninis, Italian flatbreads and bruschetta; and evening aperitivos and tapas before or after a visit to the adjoining landmark Colony Theatre for a play.

“Some of the best memories of Miami Beach happened at those tables on Lincoln Road,” Soyka told the Herald. “I think that’s why the place connected with people for so long.”

Café Roval

In 2017, Soyka opened his first restaurant in 17 years in the Morningside neighborhood, three blocks from his namesake location. Café Roval, with a flowing backyard and a pond carved out of a 1923 water pump station, was higher-end, focused on Mediterranean cuisine.

Café Roval didn’t have the longevity of his other landmarks. The restaurant closed in mid-2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

“All the property I own is because I want to open a restaurant,” Soyka told the Miami Herald when he opened his last restaurant. “It’s like a theater. Every night is a different play in a restaurant.”