The first time I met Deanna Rund, she was standing over a smoke-belching Volkswagen Beetle brandishing a pair of grill tongs. An artist friend had retooled the famously indestructible automotive icon of the ’60s for Rund’s barbecue smoker, complete with a firebox where the rear engine used to be. Her eyes gleamed manically in a soot-smudged face as she opened the car’s door on a vision of poultry purgatory: Inside the passenger compartment, chicken carcasses dangled limply from the roof, fungus white against the charred interior. This, I thought, is a cook I want to meet.
Rund and her husband, Jean Silvey, staged the Bug barbecue to celebrate the first anniversary of their quirky Cosmos Cafe, on Heights Boulevard around the corner from Rockefeller’s and the Fabulous Satellite Lounge. The day’s events included a croquet tournament in the teeth of incinerating Houston heat, an indoor electronic trivia contest and bar-side seats for a Rockets playoff game on TV. And guess what — that barbecue was some of the best I’ve eaten.
I’ve been back several times since to hang out and enjoy Rund’s cooking. With its subterranean gloom, knotty pine paneling, lava lamps and neon beer signs, Cosmos Cafe is a real bar all right, but one with real good food. Case in point: Instead of your typical bar trout (a.k.a. goldfish crackers), Cosmos offers a goat cheese and pesto terrine for which I’d happily tread hot coals. The chevre goat cheese is generously stacked in three silky slabs, punctuated with a layer of roasted red peppers and one of pesto, and topped with fat cloves of baked garlic. The highly lickable plate is frilled out with vinaigrette-dressed fancy greens and toast rounds. Seriously now, when was the last time you ate like that in a neighborhood bar? The quesadillas are good, too, and surprisingly light. Inside, they’ve got corn, zucchini, red peppers and smoothly melted cheese; outside, the subtle salsa verde is a tingly, intriguing mix of tomatillos, green chiles and cool chunks of avocado.
Lunches at Cosmos can be a lot of fun, if you’ve got the time. Because Rund and Silvey are firmly committed to making everything from scratch and to order — even pressing their own hamburger patties — you have to allow more than the standard downtowner’s 45 minutes to dine. I particularly like their generous sandwiches. The grilled tuna fillet on toasted roll can be ordered with homemade potato chips or a pickly new-potato salad, and comes with a sinus-clearing wasabi mayonnaise. Both the hand-sliced turkey breast sandwich and the vegetarian sandwich appear on firm, rustic Italian bread. I’ve never seen anyone finish the vegetarian sandwich at one sitting; it’s piled too high with roasted red peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, arugula and onions before being slathered with guacamole and eggplant spread. An advantage of eating at the Cosmos in the daytime is that you can better see the spacy airbrushed murals by Kenny Robertson, which feature sea creatures cavorting amidst a galaxy of fanciful planets. If you don’t have the weekday time, come back for the Sunday brunch. Not only can you order all sorts of eggs from the menu, you can ask Rund to make just about anything you crave. (Recently, I overheard a fanciful order from a regular for a shirred egg over sauteed spinach with an English muffin on the side.) Like a doting mother, Rund pampers, indulges and nurtures her customers.
She can also make a mean bowl of soup. One of my favorite entries is the “green chili.” It’s not chili as I know it, and it’s not green, but it is a fiery, distinctive chicken-broth-based soup loaded with green chile peppers, chunks of browned pork, perky bits of tomato and plenty of onions and garlic. I’ve dragged in a number of five-alarm junkies for this throat-searing concoction, always with satisfactory results. The soups are the most changeable aspect of the Cosmos menu, and I enjoy going for the potluck soup of the day, inspired by Rund’s whim and whatever’s good and fresh in the kitchen that day. A hearty potato and leek number made its debut on the Cosmos menu recently, as notable for what it did not contain as for what it did. It did not rely on milk or cream for body, but made its stand on the strength of its potatoes, strands of leek and a fragrant kielbasa-style sausage that permeated the bowl with flavor.
The entrees at Cosmos can be a little hit-and-miss. Recently, one of my girlfriends ordered absolutely perfect pork chops, while I endured a disappointing grilled chicken breast. The pork chops were large, thick and juicy, broiled and thoroughly basted with olive oil, garlic and fresh rosemary. My friend sucked her chop bones with lip-smacking relish, while I pouted over my salty chicken, which was drowning in butter and an overbearing load of fresh herbs. But that’s precisely what I admire about Rund’s cooking, even when she misses: She throws herself boldly and generously into everything she makes. A perfectionist when it comes to freshness, Rund grows her own rosemary, chives, basil and oregano in pots on the patio. Her pasta primavera is heaped with slabs of roasted eggplant, zucchini, carrots and mushrooms; the penne pasta with cilantro-pestoed chicken is studded with pecan halves, thoughtfully toasted for extra taste. Another evening’s standout was the roasted poblano pepper. Firm and mildly hot, the poblano was stuffed to bursting with ground turkey, rice, raisins and pecans, and then topped with a tomato-corn sauce.
And Cosmos’s side dishes are anything but secondary. I heartily recommend the standup potatoes and turnips au gratin, with its chewy, golden-brown crust of mozzarella and Parmesan. I also liked the Yankee-style mashed sweet potatoes that accompanied the roasted poblano, even though as a Southerner I normally prefer them sweet enough to give you a toothache. Rund sternly admonished me on the subject, and I have to admit that her butter-salt-and-pepper blend has a lot of integrity. After all, a sweet potato is a vegetable, isn’t it, not a dessert?
Speaking of desserts, another reason to stop by Cosmos is to satiate that late-night, post-nightclub sweet tooth. The desserts are the only thing on the menu that Rund doesn’t make from scratch; she gets her ever-changing selection from Lawler’s. Check the blackboard on the way in for treats such as the dark-and-light chocolate cheesecake. It’s a stunningly rich tower of dark and white chocolate cheesecake layers sent into overdrive with dark chocolate frosting. Even the half portion that I painstakingly divided with a girlfriend made my head swim.
While I find the Cosmos combination of neighborhood hangout and comfort-food kitchen reassuring, the bar ambiance and attitude can be problematic for family dining. Recently, I was a little disconcerted by a Greek chorus of one sitting at the next table who avidly attended to and commented on our table’s conversation. Apparently this old gentleman is a harmless regular patron, though one I’ll avoid in future. On another late evening, the boisterous antics of a crowd of bikers enlivened the bar. I know that these guys are probably middle-aged stockbrokers in real life, but Cosmos by night is not a place I’d take a faint-hearted aunt. (If I had one; mine are Scotch-drinking smokers who’d love the place. They’d even like the jukebox pounding out Joe Ely and Little Feat while you dine.)
Finally, I must admit that a few of my friends have blacklisted Cosmos because of the sometimes surly, always quirky wait staff. Our tattooed server the other night was as friendly as Opie of Mayberry, but comically inept. Repeated pleas for more tea, more silverware and more plates fell on deaf pierced ears. So here’s the trick: If you can take the cigarette smoke and ever-present TV din, dine at the bar where the regulars eat. The Cosmos bartenders are expert, telepathically attentive and — best of all — fast. And if you can’t take the smoke, you should probably stay out of the Cosmos.
Cosmos Cafe, 69 Heights Boulevard, 802-2144.
Cosmos Cafe:
goat cheese and pesto terrine, $4.95;
quesadillas, $4.95;
green chili, $4.75;
tuna fillet sandwich, $6.95;
vegetarian sandwich, $5.25;
penne pasta, $7.95;
roasted poblano pepper, $8.95;
grilled pork chops, $11.95;
pasta primavera, $7.95;
grilled chicken, $8.95.
This article appears in Aug 14-20, 1997.