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Cosmo's Cucina

            Walking into Cosmo’s Cucina you can see why it would be so crowded.

            Located on the corner of Vine and Locust street off of Westnedge Cosmo’s is definitely a bit off the beaten path of restaurant areas in Kalamazoo and definitely resonates more of a vibe as the neighborhood spot to go. Entering through the lower level of the historic Kalamazoo building and through O’Duffys Pub there were Halloween decorations in the window, paired with lights and people packed in together talking loudly and drinking. I noticed there was no TV in the bar which struck me as different, but at the same time a blessing. This little building seemed to be a haven from the pressures of the outside world. To get to Cosmo’s we had to walk through this bar area, past the bathrooms and upstairs to the restaurant in an even more seemingly different world. Upstairs was an escape from the loud crashings of the bar downstairs.

 The tables were situation comfortably close together with candles on each one. The brick walls give the room a sort of classic, historic feeling without being outdated. The small window into the kitchen at the back was an eye into a fast paced world where delicious smells were wafting out with each dish that left the kitchen.  It is the perfect atmosphere for a cold fall night.

            The wait staff was incredibly accommodating, as it was raining outside last Friday, and we were forty minutes late for our reservation due to an accident in the rainy Michigan weather. For any of you that know I-94, you know how much of a nightmare driving can be. They held the table for us and thanked us for calling to let them know. They sat us immediately next to a stained glass window that overlooked the street below. The room was humming with good vibes. Looking over at the table next to us a party of four was exclaiming about the goat cheese appetizer while gesticulating wildly with their arms, wine glass in hand.

            The appetizers we ordered arrived promptly and began with Zucchini Fritters. The Zucchini was shredded and pan seared with fresh dill, feta, and served with a yogurt and cucumber sauce. The Zucchini had a smoky flavor that could have been confused with being burnt, but the cucumber sauce was brilliant, cold, and refreshing.

A harvest salad was then swept over to our table with fresh greens, walnuts, and soft butternut squash. The menu was infused with squash and other seasonally fresh ingredients. The vinageratte was tasty without being overpowering.

 We ordered the Italian Bread that was warm and crusty and served in a paper bag, tied with thread. The dipping oil was a plate of olive oil, decorated with herbs, and a balsamic oil reduction. It looked so well done that I hated to ruin it with the bread. But after one bite I kept tearing off pieces to swipe across the flavorful oil.

            After a little while of waiting, and conversation our meals arrived after much deliberation over what to order. It was difficult to choose between noodle based dishes, risottos, and braised pork tacos. Looking around, it seemed as if we could not go wrong. Most of the customers in Cosmo’s were hungrily eating whatever was placed in front of them with smiles, usually engaged in conversation with the people at their table.

After asking the waiter for the absolute best thing in the restaurant at this particular time, we decided on plate one that was a special for the evening. It was a plate of scallops in coconut curry broth, pan seared with summer squash, limes, and carrots. The waiter informed us that they were cooked in a cast iron pan that was older than me. They tasted sweet and spicy and were the perfect amount of tough, fleshiness without being too chewy. The blend of fruits and vegetables that the scallops were cooked with added to the delightfully unexpected punch of flavor.

            Plate two was an avocado burger. With a toasted bun, the Kobe beef covered in an avocado, corn blend salsa with Chihuahua cheese. Biting down I literally had to wipe my chin from the juiciness of the meat, a burger at its best. Right next to the burger nestled under a blanket of sea salt and spices were redskin potatoes with just a little crunch to them, they were definitely a filling addition to the meal.

            Plate three was homemade pasta with prosciutto, asiago cheese, and basil. Tangled together with sweet peppers, and halved cherry tomatoes it was a colorful and fall esque dish that didn’t disappoint. Slurping up the noodles with the pepper and cheesy flavors was absolutely delicious and there was plenty to take home for leftover deliciousness.

            The menu at Cosmo’s Cucina is drenched in these different blends of creative flavors with fresh ingredients. Cosmo’s website states that they work under the goal of bringing creative and affordable food to Kalamazoo, and I believe that they have achieved this goal. The meals ran from about $14.00-$20.00 with appetizers anywhere from $3.00-$10.00, which I find reasonable for the amount of quality and quantity that is served on Cosmo’s plates. The menu is completely based off of new blends of flavors that are unexpected, but make perfect sense after hitting your tongue. I believe these are the best types of foods, dishes that you never would have thought to make for yourself. Scanning over the menu, the hungry eye picks up words like grilled, garlic, veggies, cracked pepper, Brie, flavorful, and the food follows through on these claims, leaving the eater food inspired.

            When we walked back out into the rainy, fall night we left feeling full and recharged. Cosmo’s was definitely an experience that blended creativity in a comfortable environment for anyone who enjoys fresh and flavorful meals that they couldn’t just whip up at home without some effort.

I plan on going back to try more tastes off the menu soon.       

       

Expectations For Cosmo's Cucina

            From what little I know about Romance Languages I know that cocinar means to cook in Spanish, so when I see cucina I think similarly. I think it must be Italian, and so when I go to Google and I am correct I assume that a restaurant with the word cucina in its name may have a little Italian flair. Tonight my mom, her fiance and I will be attending Cosmo’s Cucina for dinner, and this is the restaurant that I plan to be reviewing for the class. Cosmo’s is located within the Vine Street Neighborhood in Kalamazoo.

In my opinion, that seems a little bit off the beaten path in terms of restaurants. After living in Kalamazoo all summer most of my dining haunts were located in the Tiffany’s vicinity or the downtown area, or even off of Westnedge (I do love Bagel Beanery). Going to a newer area is a form of tourism itself, especially when Kalamzoo is pretty familiar to me. Their website mentions nothing about Italian like I originally thought, but instead states that they want to bring, “simply creative cooking to Kalamazoo.” In this claim, they’ve really set me up with some interesting expectations. I love creative things. I enjoy new blends of flavors. I wonder exactly what they mean when they say creative? This comment makes me think of our conversations in class over the subject of food as art. I wonder how the food and the atmosphere intersect to foster this so-called creative atmosphere.             From their picture on the website, I see a restaurant with big windows lit up with twinkling lights. I am quite fond of white holiday lights, and I believe that they better any environment. Good choice, Cosmo’s.  I heard about the restaurant from my roommate Tessa, which may also have clouded my judgments about the place. She says that it’s one of her favorites, because of the atmosphere of the restaurant. I will just have to see what she means!

The article, Culinary Tourism, that we read for class discusses new experiences for the sake of the experience itself, which is what this situation truly is. I am going somewhere for the sake of taking it all in and experiencing it. In this way, like the article suggests I am thinking of this restaurant as, “somehow different, new, or exotic.” It is a “tourist” destination.

Upon looking over their menu words catch my eye like Feta, Goat Cheese, Hummus, Spinach, all a few of my favorite words. These flavors make me so hungry. I imagine biting down on warm, cheesy, flavorful food.

  I’m happy to have included my mom and her fiancé, because not only will they want to buy me dinner, but also because she has quite the background in food experience. My mom has spent the majority of her life as a travelling and cooking woman and this background could potentially help me to better understand the food by taking in information from her into my own perspective. I know that I still have a lot to learn about tastes and the world so it’s important to learn from the people who still know more than I do.

As for my mood before I go to review this restaurant? It’s absolutely soaring as I just found out that I’m going to study away in New York City for my Winter Quarter! 

Robyn Lawley Strikes Again

Women's Body Image

Reading Response Four

         Okay, guys, here’s where I’m at, I love Thai Cuisine on Drake Road. Yes, that is the restaurant with the huge red neon letters. I couldn’t really figure out why they didn’t come up with a little more creative of a name, but I guess if they’re going for accessibility this is it. As the article points out, for people like me who have never been to Thailand, and never been told how authentic the food actually is, I really have no idea what I’m eating. Would we call it the Americanized cousin of Thai? However, it is actually probably a part of the middle ground that is discussed in the article, Culinary Tourism. There are the gold decorations adorning the walls, the elephants, the bamboo everything to make it appear “authentic.”

Now, let’s be real, when I go to Thai Cuisine I am mostly looking to get a plate of veggie, curry, pad Thai that I can eat for the next two days to feed myself. It’s slightly spicy, there’s egg, and I love noodles. I am probably not complaining. However, this is me that we’re talking about. I guess it kind of concerns me if people are attributing this to what a “Thai Experience” actually is. I’m trying to get my head all around this as I write it out, but maybe it’s not coming out very clearly.

            I also love Indian food. There’s this great restaurant in Ann Arbor called Shalimar that probably actually is pretty authentic. My dad is friends with the owner and that’s what he’s been told, something about various regions of India and the way that food differs, I’m not sure. I don’t really have time to go stay in Ann Arbor with my dad any more (I haven’t since I was much younger) so I’ve forgotten some of these things. I was however taught, that when you go to a foreign restaurant not to tempt the chef by ordering things spicier than what they appear on the menu, especially as a white girl in their restaurant.

I once went to a Thai restaurant in Battle Creek with my ex-boyfriend’s family and watched in horror as they ordered the “spicy” option on the menu. By the end of the meal they literally couldn’t talk their lips were so numb. Also, they didn’t believe me when I told them the water wasn’t going to do anything and that they should order a milk based drink…Anyways, I digress.

            I guess what I’m saying is that the whole experiencing food from different cultures is this double-edged sword (is that the phrase?).  I hope when I’m enjoying chicken korma, or naan bread I’m not actually “eating the other as a colonist,” or “taking over another group by appropriating its cultural traditions.” Instead, I hope that this is me learning to experience other flavors and tastes even if they are not completely accurate. Being a Midwestern girl, I can only eat so many potatoes.

            Also, speaking to authentic on a completely random topic, I got to thinking about my mom’s dinner parties as our own kind of foreign cuisine. I was wondering how authentic of a representation those dinner parties actually are of our “culture.” I mean, we’ve had to clean the house, she cooks a meal she normally wouldn’t take the time to do, and she dresses up for the occasion. Yes, this is my mom, but at the same time she’s been altered for the purpose of other people. How authentic can anything actually be if you’re sharing it? I don’t know, just some food for thought. Punny, right? 

Memoir-Final

When I say chicken veins, I think of chicken veins in my mind’s eye in all of their glory. I imagine the sinewy texture of them, like rubber, an opaque white with chicken drumstick batter flecking the surface. I imagine chicken veins in my teeth, in my hair, stuffed into the crevices in a lunchbox, in between my toes. The chicken veins, they loop around my fingers like rings.

When I say chicken drumsticks I imagine cold, fleshy, battered, glowing, white bone. I think of biting down on the flakiness of it. I taste the deli spices on my tongue. I can’t decide if they’re cheap, or delicious, or both. I think of licking the grease off my fingers when no one is watching. I find some pleasure when I slip the bones back inside a lunchbox. I feel the pleasure in being invisible with my bones and my veins to myself.

Growing up, I was, what one would call a nerd. I stood at 5’9 by the time I was in middle school as a regular girl giant. I believed hair gel was essential to every ponytail, I had baby fat despite my growth spurt, and I loved doing history homework. In this description of my middle school self I am ignoring my blue wire rim glasses, and the love poems that were scrawled into all of my notebooks, because I am too embarrassed to incorporate those things. If only I could tell my fifth grade self that Derek Klingaman turned out not to be so cool after all, maybe I could have stopped scrawling his name onto every available inch of paper.

            Now, you have to take into consideration how middle school girls are by definition. They are mean, and it is a cruel, wild world. In the cafeteria I was afraid to throw out my trash after lunch due to the sheer fact that I would have to walk in front of the entire cafeteria to do so.

My lunch was always packed by my mother in a blue insulated lunch box. All of my friends got to use paper bags. My mom told me that it was important to not be wasteful. I told my mom it was important to survive middle school so that you could move on with the rest of your life.

Often in this blue lunchbox, my lunch would be comprised of chicken drumsticks from Felpausch, the local grocery store. While my mom thought this was a special kind of lunchtime treat, I found it horrifying. Yes, you guessed correctly, the chicken veins. These veins infiltrated the very existence of these chicken drumsticks. They laced through the batter. They wound around the bone. In my fear of throwing out food in the cafeteria, these chicken veins found their post lunch home within the insulation of the lunch box.

After school it was my duty as a young girl to attend dance class. Ballet, Jazz and Tap were the best ways for all of us to spend Monday afternoons together. Our mothers decided this. This was before I actually loved dance. This was when dance leotards were literally the worst thing ever invented. I went to dance with the same group of girls that I grew up with, and they were the same group of girls that tortured the hell out of me on a regular basis. I never could understand why our parents insisted that we were friends.

While I took tap class the rest of the girls got to sit on the wooden bench in the lobby that was inside of the girls’ dressing room. Their mothers didn’t make them take tap like mine did. My mom told me it’s important to try everything. I told my mom that it’s important to survive dance class so you can move on with the rest of your life.

On that fated day I had chicken drumsticks for lunch along with their veiny counterparts. Those girls had figured out that I hid the veins in baggies in the corner; they had found my next weakness.

I left the resin filled dance studio to rejoin my “friends,” untie my tap shoes, brush my coarse pony tail out, put on my boots to go home. As soon as I pulled the brush through my hair and began to slide on my boots the group of girls erupted into laughter.

I remember my face getting flushed. I remember self-consciously going over everything I had just done to find an error in my actions. I remember the constricting of my throat, the rising heat through my body.

            Lucy called, “Chicken veins,” and they all laughed as if chicken veins in their stringed glory were the worst possible fate for any food, or in my case, girl. I remember the first tear that slid out, like hot embarrassment, like the way that chicken must have felt in the slaughterhouse.

The girls filed out, their soft ponytails bobbing. I pulled chicken veins out of the bristles of the hairbrush, out of the soft corners of my lined boots. I sat there with the chicken veins on my lap. I was able to fully cry by then, alone in the girls’ dressing room.

            Miss Tricia heard me. She was my dance teacher then, and the epitome of everything any of us wanted to grow up to be. She was sweet, patient, and graceful. She was like the light at the end of the tunnel for us in our awkward changing bodies. She saw the chicken veins, she saw my tears, and in a fit of anger that I had never seen Miss Tricia display she whispered between tight lips, “They’re just jealous Kate, they’re just jealous.”

            I threw away the chicken veins on my way out the door. They made a satisfying swish noise as I dropped them into the tin trashcan. I walked out into the snow, I got into my mom’s mini van, I went home. 

            My mom looked at me as I strayed in the hallway near the kitchen. In the way she tilted her head she let me know that she knew I wasn’t trying to guess what she had made for dinner. She opened her mouth and then closed it. I walked upstairs to peel the layer of dance leotard off my body before she could say anything else.

I like to think that she would have told me that being different was in my best interest. I like to think that I would have believed her, then.

I may have grown up, but the veiny taste of chicken drumsticks has not escaped me. Those veins are tough, they are sinewy, they are what carries the life through our bodies. This rare, blood mixture of who and what we are that highlights our differences, yet at the same time is our common thread.

I remember once sitting on the floor of the dance studio examining the veins in my feet while I pointed my toes. I now like to think of the veins in my changing awkward bodies while I was still a child dancing. I like to think that it was supposed to happen, like that. 

Memoir-Rough Draft

When I say chicken veins, I want you to see chicken veins in your mind’s eye in all of their glory. I want you to imagine the sinewy texture of them, like rubber, an opaque white with chicken drumstick batter flecking the surface. I want you to imagine chicken veins in your teeth, in your hair, stuffed into the crevices in a lunchbox, in between your toes. I want chicken veins to loop around your fingers like rings.

When I say chicken drumsticks I want you to imagine cold, fleshy, battered glowing white bone. I want you to bite down on the flakiness of it. I want you to taste the deli spices on your tongue. You can’t decide if they’re cheap, or delicious, or both. I want you to lick the grease off your fingers when no one is watching. I want you to find some pleasure when you slip the bones back inside a lunchbox. I want you to feel the pleasure in being invisible with your bones and your veins to yourself.

Growing up, I was, what one would call a nerd. I stood at 5’9 by the time I was in middle school as a regular girl giant. I believed hair gel was essential to every ponytail, I had baby fat despite my growth spurt, and I loved doing history homework. In this description of my middle school self we are ignoring my blue wire rim glasses, and the love poems that were scrawled into all of my notebooks, because I am too embarrassed to incorporate those things. If only I could tell my fifth grade self that Derek Klingaman turned out not to be so cool after all maybe I could have stopped scrawling his name onto every available inch of paper.

            Now, you have to take into consideration how middle school girls are by definition. They are mean, and it is a cruel, wild world. In the cafeteria I was afraid to throw out my trash after lunch due to the sheer fact that I would have to walk in front of the entire cafeteria to do so.

My lunch was always packed by my mother in a blue insulated lunch box. All of my friends got to use paper bags. My mom told me that it was important to not be wasteful. I told my mom it was important to survive middle school so that you could move on with the rest of your life.

Often in this blue lunchbox, my lunch would be comprised of chicken drumsticks from Felpausch. While my mom thought this was a special kind of lunchtime treat, I found it horrifying. Yes, you guessed correctly, the chicken veins. These veins infiltrated the very existence of these chicken drumsticks. They laced through the batter. They wound around the bone. In my fear of throwing out food in the cafeteria, these chicken veins found their post lunch home within the insulation of the lunch box.

Now shifting gears with me, after school it was my duty as a young girl to attend dance class. Ballet, Jazz and Tap were the best ways for all of us to spend Monday afternoons together. Our mothers decided this. This was before I actually loved dance. This was when dance leotards were literally the worst thing ever invented. I went to dance with the same group of girls that I grew up with, and they were the same group of girls that tortured the hell out of me on a regular basis. I never could understand why our parents insisted that we were friends.

While I took tap class the rest of the girls got to sit on the wooden bench in the lobby that was inside of the girls’ dressing room. Their mothers didn’t make them take tap like mine did. My mom had told me it’s important to try everything. I told my mom that it’s important to survive dance class so you can move on with the rest of your life.

On this fated day I had chicken drumsticks for lunch along with their veiny counterparts. Those girls had figured out that I hid the veins in baggies in the corner; they had found my next weakness.

I left the resin filled dance studio to rejoin my friends, untie my tap shoes, brush my coarse pony tail out, put on my boots to go home. As soon as I pulled the brush through my hair and began to slide on my boots the group of girls erupted into laughter.

I remember my face getting flushed. I remember self-consciously going over everything I had just done to find an error in my actions. I remember the constricting of my throat, the rising heat through my body.

            Lucy called, “Chicken veins,” and they all laughed as if chicken veins in their stringed glory are the worst possible fate for any food, or in my case, girl. I remember the first tear that slid out, like hot embarrassment, like the way that chicken must have felt in the slaughterhouse. The girls filed out, their soft ponytails bobbing. I pulled chicken veins out of the bristles of the hairbrush, out of the soft corners of my lined boots. I sat there with the chicken veins on my lap. I was able to fully cry by then, alone in the girls’ dressing room.

            Miss Tricia heard me. She was my dance teacher then, and the epitome of everything any of us wanted to grow up to be. She was sweet, patient, and graceful. She was like the light at the end of the tunnel for us in our awkward changing bodies. She saw the chicken veins, she saw my tears, and in a fit of anger that I had never seen Miss Tricia display she whispered between tight lips, “They’re just jealous Kate, they’re just jealous.”

            I threw away the chicken veins on my way out the door. They made a satisfying swish noise as I dropped them into the tin trashcan. I walked out into the snow, I got into my mom’s mini van, I went home. 

I may have grown up, but the veiny taste of chicken drumsticks has not escaped me. They are tough, they are sinewy, they are what carries the life through our bodies, our changing awkward bodies while we are dancing.