Burger Friday: Rosewater

I ate a backwards supper this week when I had business down in the Bay Area.

First, I stopped in at the mothership Cosmic Ice Cream, whose products I adore. The family-owned shop has locations in Spring Branch and Pearland, too.

The original Cosmic is a modest slot in a strip center that is perpendicular to a bigger strip center, and the wall art prefigures the famous cow-beamed-up-to-a-spaceship mural I fixated on in Spring Branch. (It's my Bluesky header, I plead guilty, with thanks to artist Armando Castelan.) Here, so close to NASA, the visual conceit is a suited-up astronaut scaling a pink mountain of ice cream.

I had to have a scoop of the Cafe de Abuelita, the most delicate of coffee ice creams, just a whisper of cinnamon in the background; and the new-to-me salted caramel butter pecan, a voluptuous number that gave me more than a little comfort.

That's because last week, when I was out near NRG world, I remembered too late that the doughty little scoop shop, Hank's Ice Cream, had closed. I've decided Cosmic is carrying Hank's butter pecan torch, albeit in a more sophisticated mode.

So what about the burger? I'm getting to that. I realized I was just a few miles away from the mighty Rosewater cocktail bar, where owner/cocktail guru Pasha Morshedi has designed a mean burger according to his exacting specs. My second course was calling me from a couple of miles up Clear Lake City Boulevard, where Rosewater sits on the northeast corner at El Camino Real.

Here's the data on why you might want to put Rosewater's burger on your to-do list:

Price: $14 for the Not Quite a Smashburger, two patties of 44 Farms beef with pickles, white onion, rosemary aioli and white American cheese on a Slow Dough potato bun. Add a cocktail and you're looking at a tab of $22—$23 if it's happy hour; $24 and up if it's not. Want a beer? Figure $19-$20.

Ordering: Check in at the host desk up front to ask for a seat at the original bar, in a newer second room on the right, or out on the front patio. A server will take your order.

Architecture: no salad stuff. On a toasted bun goes a smashy beef patty topped with white cheese, followed by another beef patty draped in more white cheese. Sinking into the cheese are white onion bits and round slices of pickle, smothered in a snowdrift of the house aioli.

Quality: Piercingly good and authoritative. The beef is good stuff, with flavor that swells as you eat. The accoutrements make it all click, from the soaringly garlicky aioli to the just-so mildness of the sweated chopped onion; from the supercharged sour-saltiness of the fat pickle slices to the retrograde mild stickiness of the American white cheese.

Some folks might quibble that the poufy Slow Dough potato bun throws off the bread-to-meat ratio. I'm fine with it. It's a high-quality choice. I just tore off a hunk or two as I ate.

Ooze rating: Fair. Smashed, but not to smithereens, the beef manages to stay juicy, and the aioli confers the wanted slip-and-slide.

Letter grade: A, for its quality and distinctiveness.

Bonus points: A big heap of excellent hand-cut fries goes for $7, which gets you more—lots more— of that wonderful rosemary aioli for dipping.

Plus there are all sorts of appealing options for non-burger types: from the peerless housemade falafel of which I have written, even unto little bar snacks like the flash-fried chickpeas. It all feels personal, its Middle Eastern inflections and high standards straight from the brain of the Iranian NASA scientist/owner.

Plus-plus: the cocktails really are all that. Skillfully balanced, unusual, carefully made.

Local color: There's always a gaggle of wisecracking regulars at the long bar in the original room; and tables along the wall are often reserved by Clear Lake neighbors and NASA staff, who can make it feel like an after-work scene from For All Mankind.

Rosewater Clear Lake, 1606 Clear Lake City Blvd., Houston, 713-922-6589. Tues—Sat, 4 p.m.—midnight; Sun 3—10 p.m.; Mon 4-10 p.m.