We’re about to head inside when something stops us: a poster of an AI-generated chimichanga. Knobbly and bronze, the log rendered before us is topped with what look like Skittles and puckered open at one end, exposing an unholy cache of nubs.
Tim cocks his head.
“What the hell,” I say.
This is not the first time my friend Tim and I have found ourselves on this square of sidewalk, dallying outside the building that houses Cosmic Cantina, a Durham hole-in-the-wall. Had I not deleted my Snapchat archive least year in a fit of surveillance state paranoia, I could fetch a decade’s trove of selfies of the two of us standing right here: masked and waiting for takeout, baby-faced and up to no good.
The poster is a new cause for pause, though. It definitely belongs to Cosmic—it says so in big letters above the monstrosity.
“Is Cosmos aware of this?” Tim asks.
“Wait, is Cosmos a real person?”
“Yes, the owner. I have his autograph on a napkin.”
I ask Tim if he noticed the poster when he stopped by earlier this week. A Durham native, he’s lived in Chicago for years but remains locked in Cosmic’s orbit, and when he visits home he invariably stops for a burrito before reaching his parents’ house—doable no matter how late he lands at RDU, as Cosmic stays open until 4 a.m.
“No, I kind of beelined inside,” he says of his recent visit.
We stop gawking and begin the ascent. Cosmic sits at the top of a heavily graffitied set of stairs, next to a dance studio, and as we climb, I take in the familiar mingled aromas of cilantro and feet.
There’s a rush of cool air when we push the restaurant door open. The lights are off and the ceiling fans are on, and the space is empty except for a family with three kids in matching Duke shirts. Surveying the room, I feel a fondness for how sturdy everything is: the tiled counter, the wooden tables, the menu board hanging from the ceiling.
The menu board. Because I have a usual order, I’m not sure that I’ve ever really looked at it until now. There are burritos and chimichangas, of course, each in three sizes: mini, regular, and giant. Apparently Cosmic also serves nachos, quesadillas, salads, and tacos. Everything comes with a choice of chicken, steak, roasted veggies, tofu, or vegan chorizo.
You can also let rice and beans stand as the protein, which is the cheapest route and the one I take. I step up to the counter and order what’s called the veggie burrito, which comes with rice, beans, and melty white cheese. All of Cosmic’s burritos are Mission style—oversized and rolled in a steamed flour tortilla, a Mexican American invention by way of San Francisco. I get mine deluxe, which adds guac and sour cream. Tim, who put me onto this order years ago, gets the same, minus the sour cream and the cheese because he’s vegan now.
With an orange soda, tax, and tip, my total is $15.10.
We give the cashier our names and go sit at a picnic table on the patio outside, an open-air platform with brick walls. Over the top of one wall is a flat rooftop behind a chain link fence.
“Remember when we used to climb on the roof?” Tim says, pointing to where the brick meets the sky. “And then they put the fence up because of us.”
“Was that because of us?” I say. “I guess we were smoking weed up there.”
A noise crackles through the loudspeaker. Tim goes inside to check if our food is ready.
I look around. As many memories as Tim and I have forged here, I do have Cosmic lore that predates him. In middle school, my friend Cameron and I both lived within walking distance of Ninth Street—the shopping and dining district by Duke East Campus that Cosmic anchors—and, flush with independence but short on cash, we built a circuit around getting as much free stuff as possible: scoring leftover milkshakes from Bryan and Erin, owners of the soda fountain Ox & Rabbit; stuffing our pockets with free sugar cookies at Harris Teeter; and, at Cosmic, buying mini burritos with our allowance money and then asking for water cups we instead filled with soda.
Tim comes back holding two plates. Dine-in orders come with chips and salsa, and we work through some of those before peeling back the foil on our burritos. When I bite into mine, it’s the same as it always has been: no air pockets; every element spread so evenly that they all turn up in the same mouthful. Divine.
I especially love how thin and soft the tortilla is, how biting into it scratches the same itch as nipping off a hangnail. I share this thought with Tim.
“I’m not sure that’s going to draw readers in,” he says.
“I’m more worried that my sentimentality is going to undermine my ravings about the food,” I say.
Some of my Durham transplant friends don’t think Cosmic is all that great, I tell Tim, which makes me worry that our conviction that it’s the best is warped by life context. It’s like The Odyssey, I tell him—Christopher Nolan’s adaptation, specifically, which I just saw—where, the way the story is told, you might suspect Odysseus of unreliability: Maybe the monsters aren’t real and Odysseus just embellished the whole voyage, dressing up how he lost all his men into something with sea gods and sirens.
“That’s an intensely American interpretation,” Tim says.
“Sure,” I say, looking pointedly at my burrito.
Tim digs a chip into the rice at the open end of his.
“Well, I don’t think anyone can deny the objectivity of Cosmic’s value,” he says.
“True. And the column is ultimately about value,” I say, feeling intensely American.
Tim keeps talking, fully on his soapbox now.
“Cosmic’s ‘giant’ burrito is $13, and it’s the size of my forearm,” he says. “If you get a burrito at Chipotle, it’s the same price and half the size. And it’s bad. None of the flavors combine into one cohesive thing.”
Tim has long enjoyed disdainfully comparing Cosmic to every other burrito he’s ever eaten, up to and including the burrito at Cosmic’s one other location, in Chapel Hill. (“One time I went there and my burrito was grilled,” he told me earlier, curling his lip.)
At our high school, the student newspaper ran a recurring segment called Faceoff, where two writers argued opposite sides of some debate. Tim wrote the Cosmic side of the Faceoff that pitted Cosmic against Chubby’s Tacos, another local Mexican spot. He brings this up right as I’m about to, recalling it as a victory story.
“What do you mean your column ‘beat out’ Chubby’s?” I ask. “It’s not like readers voted on a winner.”
“It’s one of those things where it’s like, someone had to write the other side, but come on,” he says. “Like in public speaking with Mr. Smith, my team had to argue in favor of nuclear weapons.”
In one sense, Cosmic has indeed objectively beat out Chubby’s, which no longer has a Ninth Street location, just spots in Raleigh and South Durham. Ox & Rabbit is gone, too. Harris Teeter doesn’t have the free cookies anymore.
I pick up my mostly empty ramekin of salsa and drink the dregs like a shot, overwhelmed by the passage of time. The stairs leading up to Cosmic used to be painted with an excerpt of a T.S. Eliot poem that’s since been covered over; the messages we etched into the picnic tables as teens have also since been sanded away.
There are still old messages scrawled in Sharpie on the brick walls of the patio, though, and I scan them to see if any of our handiwork has survived. I don’t find anything, but I do see, in one person’s handwriting, “AI isn’t art!”—and underneath, in someone else’s, “It could be tho.”
“Do you think Cosmic could change to a point where it wouldn’t feel as special?” I ask Tim.
“Only to the extent where that’s true for anything,” he says.
“What if they changed the burritos?”
“I mean, yeah,” Tim says. “But that’s like saying ‘What if the sun doesn’t rise tomorrow?’”
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