As a fairly recent relaunch from another former restaurant, Cosmo’s Family Restaurant in Bowling Green seeks to be a jack-of-all-trades type of place. With traditional diner-type breakfast items to heavy steak dinner, barbecue and other things, it’s got everything but pizza (a wise choice considering the flood of pizza places in town) and quite n extensive menu of goodies to try. I can’t imagine finding something you won’t like on the menu as just about every food type sees some kind of representation. Whether or not the food is prepared that way, however, may be up for debate.
The food at Cosmo’s is varied and tasty, that much is sure. I do like the breakfast items. While the pancakes are thick and tasty, and their accompanying fruit and whipped cream options are certainly a welcome surprise, the items on the menu are inconsistent. The coffee is not impressive; its bland and it tastes a little burned. The bacon is dry and almost burned; it lacks a good crunch and instead kind of falls flat. Breakfast here is a hit-or-miss affair.
Indeed, I feel like the problem is that the menu is just too big for its own good. There is no apparent specialty to what this place can create — a pages-long menu offers the specialty items of a dozen different types of places. Barbecue ribs, steaks, breakfast, sandwiches and Italian foods among them. With an overstretched menu like that, it’s easy to get mediocre results. It’s my feeling that the place is just trying to do too much. My thought would be that the place needs to scale back a little bit and focus on a few items it does best instead of trying to be everything to everyone — Bowling Green has plenty of niche restaurants with small but specialized menu. You’re not going to beat them all by offering everything.
Service is decent, and the staff is friendly and helpful. It’s got a genuine small-town diner feel, and the interior decoration and concept comes together quite effectively. Costs are in line with a standard diner as well, and makes the place easily competitive with its fellow restaurants in town. But the single defining problem Cosmo’s faces is that it is simply trying to master too many kinds of food and frankly the overall result is an average and unremarkable experience. Sure, you’ll find your favorite food here, but you won’t find yourself saying that it’s the best you’ve ever tasted. And you probably will have a hard time remembering it at all a month later. And that’s a shame.
Recommendations
- In theory, the place has just about every kind of food you can imagine and you’ll almost certainly find something you like on the menu worth a try.
- In practice, a lot of the foods are just average, and you might want to consider sticking with the described specialties to get any kind of remarkable food.
- That said, I think the breakfast food is great.
Another Food Critic 