Montreal's Cosmo Diner attracts a crowd

There's not much I don't like about Canada except maybe that it's too far away.  Of course, I don't have to pay the taxes our friends up north pay, but I don't have paid health insurance, so maybe it's a wash.
An extended weekend trip to French-Canadian Montreal included a visit to the Bio Dome, old town,  French language menus and street signs and hours and hours trying to decipher what the GPS unit was trying to tell us about making our way through this beautiful city.

Even with cameras, I wasn't rolled, beat up, hassled or harassed in center city. It was refreshing, wandering through a major city's downtown without feeling like a walking cash register. With all the cameras hanging around my neck, downtowns are generally not places in which I feel safe. Montreal, a little larger than Philadelphia and the second largest in Canada, boasts a pedestrian friendly old town section and never did I feel uncomfortable like I often do in downtowns, even in downtown York.

I like diners.  Really.  Would rather have breakfast at a diner than a classy restaurant any day.  Maybe the atmosphere is too antiseptic, maybe the wait staff seems a bit snobby. Maybe the prices are a bit much for a handful of potatoes and pair of eggs.

Whatever, the Cosmo diner was one of the highlights of the trip, as strange as that might sound. It was just a nice place. Rose Labelle's husband died a few years ago, and she went out to find work. She tried out as a waitress at Cosmo, and six years later she's still there. Only ten stools crowd the breakfast bar, and #11 customer waits until something opens up. Bubbly Niki Koulakis runs Cosmos, and put Niki and Rose together, mix in a few comedian customers, and the breakfast bar becomes a theater.

Some customers have been stopping in for 30 years, some are rookies--but only for a day.  I jokingly asked for my 'usual', after stopping for the first time the day before, and Niki promptly served up two eggs over easy with potatoes and brown bread. No one writes anything down; she figures the bill in her head.

The Cosmo isn't for everyone. If you're a germaphobe, or a U.S. health inspector, the Cosmo isn't for you. As my mother used to say, "It's clean enough to be healthy, dirty enough to be happy."