Cosmo's Diner

05/04/2025

I always say I have 3 kids but that’s really not true. I have four. My daughter met her now fiancée Mack at the beginning of the pandemic. My husband left soon after that. I remember the first night I met him. I had set fire to my oven lol. We got the fire out and then gathered around the backyard until the smoke subsided in the house. The cold September evening warranted a fire. Mack made one in seconds and we gathered around the fire pit. A broken family, it was the very first tiny step to healing. It was an acknowledgment that everything was coming apart but together we would find a way to put it back together. I remember Mack giving me a hug that night. I was falling apart after trying so hard to hold everything together so my kids would feel ok. His hug put me back together that night. He gives the best hugs.
I am so overwhelmed with happiness that my daughter has found her person, a person that will always try to be there for her, who makes her feel seen and heard. He has been there for all of us through the years. I watch his completely selfless way of moving through this life and have an eternity of gratitude for him in our life. We couldn’t have been led to healing without him. So no I don’t have three kids. I have four.
💜💜💜💜

05/03/2025

So proud of you Priyanka!!!!!! 🫶

04/30/2025

First day of chemo treatment and then this from my youngest daughter 💜 Still in tears that she wants to be my person at chemo treatment 💜 So blessed with all my kids who have had to shoulder the uncertainty of this journey and find the strength to carry on.
Niki, Nolan, Noura I love you more than all the stars in the sky ✨✨✨ It will all be ok. I promise.

04/27/2025

Owning a restaurant is hard. It doesn’t matter what year, what decade you are in it’s hard. These past five years have ravaged the restaurant industry ~ the pandemic, wars that threaten world security, rising costs. It has been a tsunami of reasons to give up. Yet restaurant owners don’t give up. Their hope stands as a testament of the resilience of the human spirit, a quiet defiance against all that seeks to break it. Restaurant owners don’t give up, we don’t walk away; if anything we go down with the ship because we know that we are blessed to have built something worth fighting for, something that feeds more than just hunger~ it feeds hearts, memories and community. When you watch ✨Drag Brunch Saved My Life✨ this Friday on Crave📺 give silent reverence to the restaurant owners who have shared their stories and opened their hearts because behind every plate is a story of survival, sacrifice and a love so fierce it kept the doors open when everything else said to quit.
💜 because Love wins. It wins every time. 😘🫶🏳️‍🌈💜

04/24/2025

04/19/2025

Priyanka is a phenomenal human being. I almost don’t want to share her with any of you because I selfishly want to believe her magic is meant just for me. At the very end of filming I did my last OTF (on the fly interview) where I recap what has happened. I was asked who Priyanka was to me. Was she mother, sister, friend? I said she was a sister. We are both Gemini’s and our sense of unfiltered fun and yet deep reflection is something only a fellow Gemini can understand. But when I was asked the question, who is Priyanka to me? I knew I wasn’t telling the whole truth. Priyanka is my fairy godmother. Go ahead and laugh but I believe in magic and so it is completely plausible that Priyanka is my fairy godmother. (and stop laughing Pri if you are reading this) She came with an army of magical people and not only transformed my restaurant but healed my heart and left me with a template for the future. She painted my ceilings pink to remind me and all of us that there is no ceiling, if this makes any sense. We spend our lives telling ourselves that there is a limit to our dreams and who we can become. But those pink ceilings are there to remind us to believe in more for ourselves; that we can overcome and achieve anything but first we have to stop limiting the belief that this is all we deserve. So whether you paint your own ceilings pink or you slow down your breathing and just accept that our lives only have limits because we make it that way. Just know that you are amazing. You deserve everything you can dream up. And accept a bit of the Priyanka magic into your own life. 💜

04/18/2025

Truth be told my favourite part of filming “Drag Brunch Saved My Life” were early morning hugs with Noah before we started shooting all the scenes for the day. He did my makeup. I just about passed out when he told me he was on the make up team for Madonna’s latest tour. I am an eighties girly so this was some kind of six degrees of separation from one of my icon’s. Noah is an artist. He would sketch during scenes as he waited to do touch ups. He shared some of his work with me during long days of filming. Incredible. I remember taking in the room during our last day of filming when we put on the drag brunch. He is there in the crowd having the time of his life. And I think that is why he left such an impression on me. He is able to share his love and joy for life in a way that the rest of us need to take notes. We all run around, caught up in our to do lists, without stopping to take time for the things that matter the most. As the forsythia’s bloom and we are reminded of new beginnings maybe this is the time of year to think about how we are all going to walk a path that is truer to ourselves and to the love and joy we have for this life. 💜

04/17/2025

There she is. My Vaness. She started working at Cosmo’s as a server at the age of 15. Now she’s 25. We have a saying here at Cosmo’s. You might come here without any balls but by the time you leave you will have grown your own set of balls. Sounds crazy but it’s true lol. At the beginning sweet Vanessa was made to yell in the kitchen if she needed something because she was so quiet spoken. During filming she was the backbone of all the front of the house service scenes. It might seem that she is in the background but trust me nothing would have worked without Vanessa. But that is the sign of a true leader. They don’t necessarily need the recognition but they are there making sure everything flows. Although there was a period of separation with Vanessa and I during the beginning of the pandemic when we reopened she was right there to step up in ways that I am eternally grateful for. She makes the best pancake batter, can solve any IT problem but most of all her sweet confidence has been what has won us service awards, makes all of you feel like you are home and deepens the essence of what Cosmo’s has meant to all of us over the years. I am so deeply grateful we were able to share the experience of filming a tv show together. We laughed together about the shakes we had on the first day of filming, watched each other grow during the experience and without knowing it at the time wrote a final, glorious chapter of Cosmo’s story. 💜🤍

04/16/2025

I have to admit I am most excited to see Tanyr’s scenes in our episode. Tanyr has been by my side in that kitchen during many a Sunday rush. He came to me at 15. During filming he turned 25. Outside of the scenes we did together I was rarely allowed to watch or listen to what he said. But I do remember being blown away at his poise. We filmed for almost two weeks off and on. At the beginning we were super aware of all of the GoPro cameras strategically placed all around the kitchen. Not to mention the camera crew who filmed~positioned at your elbow~ every egg cracked, crepe curated and burger flipped. At some point all the cameras, the mic’s taped to our bodies, the producers and film crew became normal. So much so that we would forget that we were even mic’d at all. Before the Drag Brunch Theme Reveal I theorized to Tanyr that he would be led to call me out on my huge menu and that it needed to be cut way down. But I was there to remind Tanyr that our huge menu is the essence of Cosmo’s! Out of nowhere the show runner, having heard every word, popped up to emphatically to tell us that “ No one is making you say anything! Just be yourselves!” to which he added his famous evil side eye directed at me lol.
📺 You will have to watch the show to see if I won the menu argument.

04/15/2025

I love this pic of my mom and I during the filming of the Drag Brunch. Our body language says it all. I am my mother’s daughter. I have inherited her strength and most of all the resolve to get on with life no matter what obstacle is put in my path. The Drag Brunch was beyond epic. The walls glittered and shook with cheers and laughter. Cosmo’s was transformed into another universe forever. 🪐✨