CLEVELAND, Ohio — The day Tom Ballog died, last New Year’s Eve, felt like the day the music died at Sokolowski’s University Inn in Tremont.

As we noted in a story early this year, the piano music Ballog played on Friday and Saturday nights was as much a part of dinners at Sokolowski’s as kielbasa and kindness.

Read Tom Ballog’s front page obituary from Jan. 2, 2019

“It was real tough to fill his spot,” said the restaurant’s co-owner Bernie Sokolowski. “Two days after he died, I started getting calls and I said. 'I don’t care how good they are, I’m not hiring them.’ Tom wasn’t even cold.”

After several weeks of mourning, Sokolowski — himself a piano player — began conducting auditions for a new pianist.

And in walked Guytano Parks, who had studied under renowned pianist Eunice Podis at the Cleveland Institute of Music and who once played a series of gigs at Radio City Music Hall with Liberace in 1985. He’s been playing professionally since he was 13 and plays all over town, at the Velvet Tango Room on Wednesday nights, regularly at the Cleveland Clinic as a musician in residence there.

Sokolowski told Parks to play “Misty” for him and he liked what he heard. And then he requested “As Time Goes By.”

“That got him the job,” said Sokolowski. “He played it with the same feel as Tom did. It reminded me so much of the way he played it. I knew then that he was definitely the man.”

Parks, 60, was born in Richmond Heights and lives in Cleveland Heights. It was his playing, not his patronage, that got him hired. He admitted he had never eaten at Sokolowski’s.

The food and the family won him over quickly.

“It’s the most delicious gig I’ve ever had,” Parks said. “I don’t eat on the weekends except for the one meal there. It’s enough.”

He plays every Friday and Saturday from 5 to 8:30 p.m. And the customers are as generous with tips as the restaurant is with its portions as he plays all the standards, including the Polish happy birthday song, “Sto lat,” which he already knew having played at a Polish restaurant in Chicago in the 90s.

Ballog, who was beloved in his two decades at the Sokolowski’s piano, seemed to know every song and could play it on command when a customer walked in. He’d come to know their favorites and played it before they even asked. He was not classically trained, but he connected with crowds.

Parks knows the standards, movie music, show tunes, classical and jazz. And he’s still learning, arriving for each gig with two binders of sheet music the size of telephone books.

“I’m blessed to get a guy like him,” said Sokolowski, “because Tom’s shoes are so hard to fill.”

Read more about Sokolowski’s University Inn:

Landmark Sokolowski’s University Inn has recipe for success (review)

Sokolowski’s University Inn Has the Second Best Cafeteria-Style Food in U.S., New Report Finds

Sokolowski’s University Inn in Cleveland makes Travel & Leisure magazine’s first ‘Best Places to Eat Like a Local’: Restaurant Row

Bernie Sokolowski leads the third generation at Sokolowski’s University Inn: My Cleveland