It all began with a roller skating rink. Yes, you heard right - Miami's mega-restaurateur Mark Soyka attributes his knack for hospitality to disco music and roller skates. While gliding along to Kool & the Gang, Soyka realized that "creating an environment" was his calling. After opening Manhattan's first roller skating ring, The Metropolis Roller Skate Club, 61-year-old Soyka added numerous other hotspots to his resumé - notably South Beach's News Café , Van Dyke Café, Segafredo Zanetti and Biscayne Corridor's Soyka Restaurant and Andiamo Pizza .

But before Soyka slapped on skates and sang along to the tune of sweet restaurant success, he was just an only child, living in the café-kissed town of Tel Aviv. "I've always had an entrepreneurial spirit," Soyka says. "Strangely enough, it comes from my mother because my father was an actor and poet." Soyka's parents owned delis and cafes, to which he accredits slicing cheeses behind the delis" counters as the precipice to his love affair with food and cafes. As required by all Israelis, Soyka joined the Army for two and a half years and surprisingly recalls the experience as "wonderful." He adds, "For someone who grew up as an only child, the Army balanced me out - I was able to learn about independence and physical training."

After the Army, Soyka wound up in the Big Apple at the age of 21. A foreigner to the English language, he lived in the humble confines of the YMHA (Young Men Hebrew Association). While he says, "I was never an academic," he did pursue his instinct for design and architecture at the New York School of Interior design. Between classes he worked odd jobs. "You name it, I did it. I parked cars and was a delivery boy. But I did everything the "Soyka" way. If a parking lot held only 40 cars, I parked 80."

Soyka eventually found himself dabbling in real estate by day and sliding against a slippery surface by night. Socially speaking, he caught word of Empire Roller Dome in Brooklyn's ghetto and daringly decided to attend its Wednesday night party open to outsiders. Mesmerized by the disco music and sheer sensation of skating, these Wednesday night experiences changed his life. "Skating is a cult - sex appeal became passé, only skate appeal was right. If a pretty girl was on the floor and couldn't skate, she just didn't look good, Soyka reminisces. So what started as a close-knit group of four friends grew to a gaggle of 300 and skating became, "something addictive and something I could not get out of my system. The biggest event of my life was Wednesday night," Soyka says.

With a deep devotion and insight into the skating world, Soyka and his friend Marlo Courtney opened Manhattan's first-ever roller skating rink, Metropolis Roller Skate Club, in the late `70s. "When Marlo and I entered the ring on opening night, my life changed forever. I still get goose bumps thinking about it." Celebrities such as Andy Warhol, Diana Ross and Dustin Hoffman paid homage to the hotspot. Never taking skates off his feet, Soyka literally slithered into a momentum of making people feel free and alive.

With the triumph of Metropolis under his belt, Soyka opened a cabaret at Upstairs at Greene Street and a supper club at The Green Street Café in SoHo alongside his associate, Tony Goldman. It was Goldman who ultimately invited Soyka to the shores of South Beach in an effort to help renovate the Park Central Hotel in `86. Soyka says he soon fell in love with Miami Beach. "There was something about the beach, the ocean, the smell. It took me back to Tel Aviv. And before I knew it, my New-York-state-of-mind was in a different place." He happened to find himself at the right time and in the right place. But back then, Miami Beach was a far cry from the Easter-egg colored city it is now. It was ridden with boarded-up buildings, low-rent transients and druggies. Soyka says, "I would see policemen chasing people on the streets. It could have been one of two things - they were chasing crack addicts or filming Miami Vice. That was it. There was nothing around."

"But I knew Miami Beach was going to be a bigger place," Soyka says. In `87, he decided to do his own thing and hone into his hospitality roots by opening Jeffrey's Ice Cream at the then-quiet 800 Ocean Drive. A year later, the fashion world whizzed in with caravans, models, photographers, production companies and the like, so Soyka closed the ice cream parlor in an effort to enlarge. During the expansion, Soyka says, "Tel Aviv came back to me - the kiosks that served bagels, newspapers and magazines - and I decided to open some sort of news café that sold books, papers, CDs, sundries and the like." Unwittingly, the comfortable European café was dubbed News Café in `88, and in due course it became a SoBe institution where locals and tourist mingled over sandwiches and stories. Soyka attributes The News' success to "the fact that the word "no" is out of our vocabulary. Do you want to make an American Express charge for a dollar? We'll take it. Do you want to sit with a glass of water and coffee for 20 hours and meet your friends? It's OK. I come from cafés and they are hangouts. I want people to congregate here." Open 24 hours, 365 days a year, News Café, which seats over 350 and serves thousands daily, is considered the "grand central" of South Beach.

The News Café's notoriety helped Soyka move onward and upward. He made a splash on to Lincoln Road with Van Dyke Café in `94 and soon added South Florida's premiere jazz club, Upstairs at the Van Dyke. In the late `90s, he made the bold move of opening Soyka Restaurant on Biscayne Boulevard and is now credited for initiating the "Biscayne Renaissance." Recent additions to his teeming resumé include Lincoln Road's Segafredo (in partnership with fellow SoBe pioneer Graziano Sbroggio) and the Upper East Side's Andiamo Pizza. While Soyka is often celebrated as a clairvoyant for his brilliant choice of locations, he says, "I know I get a lot of credit for being a visionary, but I think I should get more credit for having the guts to do things."

While Soyka's days are spent zipping from restaurant to restaurant, he does find time to smell the roses. He spends time with his wife and four kids, collects vintage cars, and horseback rides. "I am very content with my life." As for the future, he hopes his children will make the best of what he's built. And as for those roller skates in his closet, Soyka admits with a Cheshire-cat smile, "I still do skate and always will."