by Amanda Tripp

Fact: I am good at restaurants and bad at men. Fortunately for me, this usually means that even really bad dates result in pretty good meals. As a newcomer to Montreal’s smorgasbord of my two favorite vices, I took full advantage of the city in an all-you-can-eat kind of way. These days though, I’m more of a vegetarian-plus-fish kind of girl, and as my long-term boyfriend will tell you, I only eat meat on the weekends. I didn’t get there all on my own though. In fact, one place in particular has helped me weed through relationships the way no girlfriend ever really can: rude, honest, no-stakes in your face judgment with a side of hash. Cosmos’, NDG’s favorite greasy spoon (and subject of the documentary Man of Grease – for sale on VHS at the cash!) , has been helping me separate the men from the boys since the day we met. It was the spring of ’07, and I was riding out a much anticipated morning after with the promise (and geographical alibi of) breakfast for lunch.

Cosmos’ isn’t much to look at (though neither was he if we’re being honest here), but it grows on you (can’t say as much for him). Cosmos feels like it’s as old as they city itself, and it’s got the confidence to match. The walls are plastered with newspaper clippings and hundreds of varieties of paper currency, varied with postcards sent by loving customers longing for a little mish-mash while on vacation, dreaming of an infamous blend of four eggs, bacon, sausage, ham, salami, tomato, onion, cheese and toast (and yes, you can get it “for two” if you’re feeling especially romantic).

There’s barely room for the 11 available stools in this hallway-of-a-diner, so you might have to wait, but in the summer you have the option of sitting outside on their makeshift patio – a popular option and a great way to spend a blurry Sunday morning. Not your downtown student demographic, Sherbrooke West of the Decarie usually has some pretty exciting street drama to offer. Inside or out, this is a community place, choc-a-bloc with regulars ranging from Friendly-Neighborhood-Poker-Con to What-the-Fuck-are-you-Looking-at-Pass-me-the-Sugar Guy.

It’s a place for sharing: the single coffee pot, carton of milk, lone ketchup, pot of jam being passed from table to table. The menu–if you dare ask for it–is a masterpiece of hangover fantasies, the “Creation” sandwich: fried egg, bacon, salami, cheese, lettuce and tomato ($4.75, available vegetarian option – my personal favorite), the Mixed Grill: 2 eggs any style and mix of all meats (salami, ham, sausage and bacon, $8.50), and basically every other combination of egg, bread, potato and deli meats your cholesterol-craving heart desires, with unlimited coffee if you can sweet-talk your way to getting any.

This is the thing about Cosmos’: it’s shortcomings (or, what I like to call character) tend to bring out the worst or the best in people, depending on how well they fare outside their comfort zone. The guy who introduced me to this place seemed to think the best way to manage the joint anxieties of a one-night-stand and a grumpy-no-bullshit grillman would be to more or less ignore me in favor of aforementioned So-You-Play-Poker-Guy, who has literally approached every dude I’ve brought there since. I resented his advances on my men at first, but he’s turned out to be a good barometer for how well the liaison at hand is going to fare. Months later, I introduced my second-time-around boyfriend and another couple to Cosmos’: though friends had gently suggested that break-ups usually happen for a reason, it took a long and frustrating breakfast to shed the light on bad-boyfriend reality. Not content with taking in the scenery (or our own supposedly-enjoyable company), all three diner-newbies bitched and whined throughout the whole experience, ranging from complaints about slow service, making snide remarks about the place’s appearance and clientele, and threatening to dine and dash. I think not. When you come to a place with a history, you shut up and feel it out. Cosmos’ doesn’t care about your timelines, Cosmos’ cares about grilling, and, I believe, it cares about its own: you’ve got to earn a place somewhere in that list, and if you don’t have time to find out why, there’s a lineup of people out the door waiting to take your place. He would soon find out that that went for me too.

Over the years, a few others failed the breakfast test – the only notable exception being Would-be-Perfect-if-De-Didn’t-have-a-Girlfriend-Friend: a long shot at sharing something I loved with someone I liked and not having it turn them into a monster. Needless to say we had a great, hours-long breakfast, confirming my fears that maybe I was doomed to a life of delicious platonic relationships and boyfriends I could only take to franchises.

And then, unexpectedly, something wonderful happened. After months of awkward transition from lifelong-childhood-friends to more-than-friends-after-midnight-fight-about-it-in-the-morning-friends, leaving us both with the feeling of nothing to lose, nothing to gain, one man passed the Cosmos’ test. Too proud and too scared to say what we felt for too long, this guy and I were testing the limits of friendship and it was not going well. On one particularly bad morning, we meet a couple we like for breakfast at Cosmos. They’re cute and chatty, we’re sullen and weird. We pass ketchup and sugar with the other tables, evade wasps and eye-contact, earn our cups of coffee, talk about NDG, hockey, politics, tell Poker-Guy none of us play poker and laugh with our eyes as he slinks away. It’s all sort of loose and casual, half-finished sentences and feet up on the table – relief from passive aggressive standoffs and confessions. My friend and I share a plate of potatoes because one order got lost in the mix, and it’s hard not to think that’s a sign all on its own. It’s exactly how I want breakfast to be, and with every greasy bite it becomes clearer that it’s exactly who I want breakfast to be with. When cute-couple goes in to pay their check, my friend quietly asks how my breakfast was, and I say good, because it really was, and he says yeah, mine too, and we don’t mean anything more by it than that for once, and there’s something luxurious about that right now. When we go in to pay, we get literally crushed together by the crowd at the cash, and smushed up against each other against our wills, he looks at me funny, because we’re the only ones who care, and I look at him funny, and we laugh a bit. In the melee, it’s nice to feel together. And we’ve felt that way ever since.

Cosmos’ Snack bar is open 6:30-4:30 every day and located at 5843 Sherbrooke Ouest
(514) 486-3814.