By Neal Pollack
Sams is glad-handing people in the back of the room. Kenny Sadjak, the band’s keyboardist, launches into a New Orleans-style rendition of Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Crazy Arms.” The crowd whistles and sings along.
They play “Roll Over Beethoven.” When they swing into “Johnny B. Goode,” Sams leaps up onto the bar, pumps his fist, rips off his sweater, and throws it at Hader’s feet. Hader lifts a beer in his direction. The crowd goes berserk. Sams’s wife, Marie, gets up on the bar with him and they dance the twist. The song ends, and Sams stumbles outside.
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In the bar’s 50 years of operation it was owned by three different men and had three different names. Bill Cody christened the place Cody’s in 1946 and put in a long oak bar high enough to lean your elbows on while standing. He didn’t bother to order any stools, since he mainly intended for his customers to stay as long as it took to gulp down a pint and get the hell out. He sold the place in the 60s to a neighborhood fellow named Johnny Martin, who named the place Johnny Martin’s. Martin painted the place black and replaced the original bar with one that had glass blocks and neon lights. The core of Martin’s customers was a bunch of crusty old anglers with whom he took fishing vacations in Wisconsin. They covered the walls with their catch, mostly marlin and walleyed pike.
For the first six months that he owned the bar, he retained the Johnny Martin’s moniker, intending to let his customers rename the place in a contest. But when he started sponsoring local basketball teams, he needed something to put on their T-shirts. One night Sams says he went out with some friends, got stinking drunk, and wrote down a bunch of names on his cocktail napkin. When he woke up the next afternoon, Rest ‘n’ Pieces stood out.
The cooking process was always a bit haphazard. Hader came in early to the bar last summer at the height of a heat wave and found Sams standing in the kitchen, preparing the special, a pot of beef stew. Sams was shirtless, dripping with sweat, and smoking a cigarette with an ash more than an inch long. His belly protruded over a pair of dirty white sweatpants. “Whatever you do,” Hader told his customers that day, “don’t order the special.”
Hader is 43, a tall and garrulous bundle of muscle, energy, and wit. During his bartending shifts, Tuesday and Friday nights and Wednesday afternoons, he’d run Indian dice games out of a big black rubber container. Patrons would get to dump ten dice for a dollar bet. Five of a kind meant a free drink. Six meant half the pot. At closing time, around 2 AM, Hader and whoever was left standing would “test” the bar’s sound system, blaring AC/DC until ashtrays shook on the counter.
