New York: Where Service Became a Craft
Ask Mark what shaped him most and he’ll take you back to New York City—where hospitality is a contact sport and excellence a daily discipline. He grew up in Glendale, Queens, a subway ride from the old-school dining rooms that taught him how a team moves in lockstep and how a single gesture can turn dinner into a memory.
“I’ve never worked for a bad boss,” he tells me—an unusual confession in an industry that runs on heat and friction. “Hard, sure. Demanding, yes. But not bad.” That distinction matters to him. It speaks to values—clear standards, shared expectations, the kind of leadership that hires hard and then manages easy- because the culture carries the load.
Roaquin’s résumé threads through names that defined a generation of New York dining: Danny Meyer’s constellation (including Shake Shack), Tabla in Madison Square Park (now closed; its trailblazing chef later a COVID casualty), and the NoMad Hotel, where he served as a dining room captain and server. He calls NoMad “easily the best work experience I’ve ever had.”
Why? “The teams were so synchronized,” he says. “We had a lot of rules—it’s fine dining—but management trusted us to break those rules in service of the guest.” He describes a classic “legend” moment, the hush-toned service story that spreads through staff like folklore: A couple sits tucked in a quiet corner. The woman admires a tiny metal vessel next to her Moscow mule. Could she keep it? Technically, no. But Roaquin sensed an opportunity.
“My manager asked me first: ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘I think they’re celebrating something special. Maybe this is a chance to create a legend.’ He said, ‘Let’s do it. Get them a new one in a box.’ I came back, told them I couldn’t give them the one on the table—then produced the boxed one from behind my back. They burst into tears.” He never learned why. He didn’t need to. “Sometimes you don’t ask. You meet people where meaning already exists.”
That is the NoMad ethic he carries with him: precision in technique, elasticity in empathy.
Culinary School and the Grammar of Taste
Roaquin started playing piano at eight, but his professional schooling began in kitchens and dining rooms. He studied hotel management and culinary arts—not to escape the front-of-house, but to understand it more deeply. At the Culinary Institute of America upstate New York, and later in management programs (he mentions Cornell with a reunion on the horizon), he absorbed the anthropology of taste as seriously as he learned P&L sheets.
In an introductory class on gastronomy, he encountered the concept of “super-tasters”—people whose dense taste buds map the world in layers. He’s agnostic about labels, but he understands the implication: hospitality requires sensitivity, whether you’re tasting a sauce, pairing a wine, or reading a table.
The through-line wasn’t celebrity proximity. It was systems: mise en place in the kitchen, choreography in the dining room, and a values baseline about never hiding the hard parts of the job.
He tells a story about a different restaurant—Tamarind on 23rd Street (now defunct)—where ownership meant showing up, sleeves rolled, no excuses. “If the refrigerator broke at 5 p.m., the owner got a new one moved in before service,” says. “No purchasing department. No hiding. Just: this is mine, we will deliver.” He calls that values, not just rules: an insistence on standards you can see.
Austin Arrival: Reading a New Room
Roaquin and his wife moved to Austin in 2017—her family ties are in Sugar Land and the Houston area; Austin had been their bachelor/bachelorette playground. “We fell in love with the city. Cool vibe, we thought it would be easy to resettle.” Through a wine-world connection, he landed at Perla’s and then Lambert’s at McGuire Moorman Lambert (today MML Hospitality) in management.
He quickly realized his New York muscle memory didn’t automatically translate. That wasn’t a judgment; it was reconnaissance. “From day one, good managers pulled me aside and said: ‘Your intentions are noble. But that’s not how it is here. We’re too busy to chase “wow” moments on every table.’” He disagreed—politely. “You’re not that busy,” he told them. “You need to be more intentional. Efficiency is a decision.”
Still, he felt the variability in service quality across the city. Some of that, he thinks, is demography—different pathways into hospitality, different notions of career versus job, and a younger labor pool that isn’t inculcated with fine-dining rigor. “My best employees at Perla’s were often grad students: disciplined, malleable, primed to learn. That’s not ageism; it’s about mindset.”
Which is a statement in itself. Did he imply that Austinites over the age of say 35 were more traditional or stuck in their ways?
He contrasts Austin’s theater scene (which he follows as an avid observer) with its orchestral and marching-band culture. I offer the comment, “The bands are world class because they’re run like the military—single commander, discipline, repetition. That is what the state of Texas is known for, besides sports, and of course oil, gas and cattle. Theater’s more uneven. It’s a systems thing.” That read—neither cynical nor boosterish—reveals his operator brain: when quality is inconsistent, look for the system underneath.
Culinary Again: The Long View on Hospitality
Roaquin isn’t nostalgic for New York; he’s comparative. He admires Houston’s restaurant ecosystem—its immigrant energy, its cosmopolitan mix, the density of professionals working at the top of their craft. Many Austin talents, he notes, have migrated to Goodnight Hospitality and other groups in Houston, chasing opportunity and scale.
But his personal metric for greatness remains unchanged: clarity of identity and the ability to execute it every night. He cites the famous Brooklyn steakhouse, Peter Luger as a parable—servers who can double a check with eight well-placed sides because that’s the house style. “Is it manipulative? Maybe,” he shrugs. “Is it professional? Absolutely. They know who they are.”
Knowing who you are is, to him, the heart of hospitality. And it’s the bridge to his second act.
Steinway & Sons, Austin: From Dining Rooms to Showrooms
One day, driving towards downtown on 183, Roaquin saw the Steinway sign. A Queens kid who grew up near Steinway Street, he felt a tug—call it serendipity or a musician’s homing instinct. He applied for a job. Timing cooperated. Matthew Bird, whose family runs the Steinway Piano Gallery in both Austin and San Antonio, hired him—with a caveat.
“You know hospitality and sales,” Bird said to him. “Now you need to learn this world.” That meant the mechanics of the piano—the geometry of the soundboard, hammer shapes, scale design—as well as a sales cadence unlike cars, sofas, or electronics. In September of his first year, Steinway sent Roaquin to the factory for William Steinway University, a three-day, small-cohort immersion: product, provenance, and the psychology of a purchase that is equal parts instrument and heirloom.
“There are only about 75 Steinway dealers in the country, and fewer than 200 consultants and product specialists,” says. “You get to know each other. Our clients often have homes in multiple cities. There’s a code: you don’t sell into someone else’s market, but you collaborate because the customer’s life crosses geographies.”
He’s been with Steinway six years now—longer than he spent in Austin restaurants. Day to day, he “runs the teacher program,” his phrase for a vital artery in Steinway’s ecosystem: the Steinway Educational Partner network. It isn’t exclusive—music rarely is. It’s reciprocal.
“Teachers use our recital hall; they refer students to us; we refer students to them,” he explains. “If a parent asks where to find a classical teacher who’s competitive and prepares students for juries, we have names. If they want songwriting or a casual vibe, we have names. The match matters.” In a city where not every family is ready to purchase a $92,000 hand-built New York Steinway baby grand, matching also means triaging price points without diluting experience.
“Steinway creates three tiers,” he says. “Hand-built New York Steinways start around the low $90,000s for the smallest grand and run to well over $200,000 depending on size and finishes; concert instruments are a different category entirely. Then there’s Boston, launched in the 1990s, and Essex in the 2000s—production-line instruments made in Japan and China to Steinway’s design geometry.” The crucial bit, he insists, is design continuity: hammer shape, soundboard philosophy—“so the feel and voice track across the line.” Entry-level uprights start near $7,000; seven-foot grands for homes in the $140,000–$150,000 range are more common in Austin than you might think.
His world is not only sales. It’s community: recitals, studio showcases, duet evenings (“Jay and Luna,” he notes offhand, “two brilliant UT-connected pianists”), and the soft-power work of knowing where the musical lineage flows—teacher to TA to doctoral student to performer to teacher again. “It’s like kitchens,” he smiles. “Work for one chef, and you’ve quietly worked for their sous-chefs and protégés. Respect the lineage.”
“Are You the GM?”: Ownership Without the Title
Early in our conversation, I ask if he’s Steinway’s GM. He laughs. “Hardly,” he says. “Matthew Bird and his family run piano Gallery Austin; they also own the Steinway showroom in San Antonio. I’m the other guy.”
Then he describes his days and—without meaning to—describes a general manager’s posture: pipeline reviews, teacher relations, showroom decisions, and the occasional clogged toilet. “There are two of us,” he says. “Sometimes I make ownership-style calls- running them by Matthew—but yes, I work like I run the place because…we are it.”
That “ownership mentality,” he notes, is something his favorite employers cultivated—Danny Meyer’s groups, the Tamarind owner who bought a refrigerator at 5 p.m., the NoMad crew who trusted him to create a legend. “You used a word I hadn’t used about myself,” he tells me later. “Entrepreneur.” He pauses, turning it over. “I’ve never really heard it put that way before.”
But the fit is obvious. Entrepreneurs do more than sell; they build systems, read rooms, take responsibility. They accept constraints—two-person staff, tight margins, the patient timelines of major purchases—and still ask how to exceed expectations. They lead without waiting for the title to catch up.
From Food to Music: The Common Language
The gravitational shift from restaurants to pianos wasn’t a detour back to childhood so much as a lateral move within the same universe. Hospitality taught Mark to stage a scene, build a crescendo, and leave a resonant aftertaste. Pianos expanded the time horizon of that work. A dinner disappears by morning; a piano can anchor a family for a generation.
The best dining rooms—and the best showrooms—depend on a triad he’s been honing since Queens: identity (know who you are), standards (do the thing properly, the same way, every time), and permission (break the rule when the guest’s story asks for it). That’s how you turn a simple copper cup into a private sacrament. That’s also how you help a family choose between a Boston and a New York Steinway without condescension or push.
He’s candid about price and value. He’s candid about market agreements among dealers. He’s candid about Austin’s quirks and gifts. He’s the person you want explaining why your seven-year-old’s upright should have a responsive action or why a seven-foot grand might make more sense than a nine-foot behemoth in a living room. He’s not selling you a piano; he’s inducting you into a lineage.
Coda: Hunter College High, Hamilton, and the Quiet Guardrails of Friendship
Before we wrap, he mentions a small biographical footnote with an outsized cultural echo: Hunter College High School, class of ’98. One of his classmates? Lin-Manuel Miranda. “We sang together, made musicals together, traveled in chorus from eighth grade on,” he says. At one point, Miranda asked to help transcribe chords for a student musical. “His theory chops back then were basic,” Mark says, not unkindly, just actually—the way you might describe a classmate who became, against all actuarial odds, the most famous person from the yearbook.
Does he get hit up for tickets or introductions? “People ask,” he says, then smiles. “But my high school friends are protective. That’s our guy. He’s busy. He’s doing things.” It’s a pleasant reminder that the most durable networks aren’t transactional; they’re custodial.
The Entrepreneur He Didn’t Think He Was
If you’ve watched a seasoned captain at a four-star restaurant conduct a room—pacing the meal, choosing the moment to lean in, knowing when to disappear—you already understand what Mark does now. He’s changed stages, not scripts. In Austin, he’s building bridges between teachers and families, between instruments and rooms, between heritage craft and a city that’s still learning how to be demanding in the best way.
So, is he a GM? “Hardly,” he says again, chuckling.
Is he an entrepreneur?
Absolutely. Even if he only just found the word for it.
For information about pianos and events held at Steinway,m visit: https://www.steinwayofaustin.com/