Longtime Lakewood Landing Bartender and GM Roger Nelson Has Died

Lakewood Landing’s longtime bartender Roger Nelson, a fixture in the Dallas bar scene, died on Oct. 8. He started working as a bartender when he was 18 years old, landing a job at Boss Cafe on Lower Greenville Avenue in the late ’80s.

In 2014, Nelson was the Observer’s best bartender and at the time told Eater the initial reason he wanted a job in the service industry was so that he wouldn’t have to cut his long hair. He said he lied his way into his first job, claiming he had experience when he had none. But he picked up the knack quickly and eventually grew to love it. In that same Eater interview, he said a big perk was having weekdays off to go fishing.

“There’ll be five miles of traffic on 635, backed up and stopped, and I’m going 70 the other way with a boat. It’s fun. It’s just like skipping school, you know?” Nelson said.

He spent time at Coyote Bar in the West End, Warrants and the Gypsy Tea Room. Around 2009 the owner of Lakewood Landing, Bill Rossell, lured him over to the motherland of Dallas dive bars, where Nelson made a home. There he became a calm and strong presence.

“He saved my life,” Rossell says. “I got really sick, and I had to have a liver transplant, and it came to that point where it was around Christmas and they sent me home. There was nothing else they could do.”

While on the waiting list for a transplant, Rossell got a call to go to the hospital, but it turned out to be a false alarm. A few days later, they called again. “I said, ‘No, it’s a false alarm I’m not going back down there again.’ Well, they called up Roger, he came over and picked me up, threw me in his truck and took me.”

Before and since then, the two spent a lot of time doing what Nelson loved most: fishing.

“We went fishing last week and we figured out we’d been fishing together at least a thousand times,” Rossell says.

“It was shocking because he such a tough guy,” says Jordan Lowery, who bartended alongside Nelson at Lakewood Landing, of Nelson’s death. “He was a straightforward, tough guy who let you know how he felt about you right away. Everything was right there on the surface, but because he had no patience for fake people, you knew that if he liked you, it was authentic.”

Current bartender Laura Harrell also fibbed her way into bartending at the Landing, much like Nelson did. She says Nelson quickly figured out she had no experience when she couldn’t work the soda gun on her first shift.

“He could have thrown me out in the first five minutes,” Harrell says. “But he stayed with me on all my shifts for a month and taught me how to bartend. I’ve been working here since.”

Creating that dive bar culture where everyone has a place was, in part, curated by Nelson. One year a regular customer bemoaned the fact that he didn’t have anyone to drink his family’s Christmas Eve milk punch with.

“And Roger was like, ‘Well, Christmas Eves are kind of dead,'” recalls customer Denise Foster. “‘What do you need? What’s in it?’ He told him and I was like, I’ll bring the nutmeg and grater. And it was like six of us and we each brought an ingredient. And it kind of became a thing for four or five years until the pandemic.”

Lowery experienced a lot of Nelson’s more ornery side. “After work sometimes I’d leave my car at work and take an Uber home and I’d get back and there’d be a handwritten note on my car from ‘Heather’,” Lowery says, explaining that Nelson would pen saucy letters and sneak them into pockets and on cars to get others in trouble.

Another time Rossell and Nelson were talking one day after fishing about Rossell’s 1972 Dobson, which was forever at a car shop. It was supposed to be getting restored but was just languishing there. Nelson suggested they steal it back.

“We got a locksmith that we knew to meet us up there,” Rossell says. “We broke in, got my car back. He was always up for an adventure.”

“He was legend,” Rossell says. “Larger than life.”