She ate: Out of this world pizzas

I went to Cosmos for lunch to dip my toe in the pool. I had a beet salad with feta and pistachios ($9), which was the best beet salad I’ve had since my visit to Copper in the Walnut Hills County Club a thing a few years back. (It might still be a thing, but Copper keeps changing its plan and its food and ain’t nobody got time for that.)

Now ready to begin this assignment in earnest, the fiancé and I threw ourselves headfirst into our research. On each visit to Cosmos, we ordered two pizzas. On one of the visits, we also had bruschetta with sweet corn, ramps, avocado cream, and cilantro ($6). We liked that the bread wasn’t toasted to the point that it scraped the roof of your mouth, but it needed a sprinkle of salt on top and we would have liked the avocado cream to be a little bit chunkier. On another visit we started with the duck fat fries, which are thick-cut and are perfectly crisp.

Here’s the lineup of what we ate, in order from our least to most favorite.

Boursin: This pizza was topped with sliced andouille sausage, small pieces of ham, roasted red pepper slices and “Cajun dust.” Whatever the dust was, it was quite spicy. Compared to everything else we had, this pizza was totally forgettable with no depth of flavor.

Runny egg: As is popular nowadays, this pizza was topped with a sunny side up egg. What it was not topped with was the mozzarella that was promised me, as there was an expanse of at least two inches between the edges of the egg and the crust topped only with tomato sauce and a couple of pieces of spinach.

Genoa salami: Now we’re picking up steam. This pizza was gorgeous, with big slices of salami, dollops of creamy mozzarella, slightly sweet Peppadew peppers and fresh green spinach. For my taste, the salami was a bit too acidic, but for the fiancé, this drew a close second to the pepperoni pizza.

Pepperoni: Probably the fanciest pepperoni pizza in a 50-mile radius. He loved it. “This one has a lot of things on it,” he said, and it did. Pepperoni, andouille sausage, tasso ham, pancetta, and mozzarella topped this one, a heft of toppings that demands a strong crust. Crust is what Cosmos might do best. It’s doughy, but nowhere near deep dish. It’s a golden, beautiful crust with a thin layer of crispiness and subtle yeasty undertones. I could slather it with the American Spoon jam and eat it for breakfast any day. The crust doesn’t sag under the weight of the toppings, but you’ll certainly need two hands to eat it (forcing you to end up with what I call “pizza hand”).

Bosc pear: Along with the Boursin, I got this pizza as takeout on Friday night to enjoy on the patio with our pup Wally. With thinly sliced pear, salty pancetta, tangy blue cheese — but sadly missing the arugula listed on the menu — now this was a gourmet pizza. The sweetness of the pear counterbalanced the saltiness of the pancetta, which otherwise would have been too overwhelming. Tavern 109 still has my favorite pear pizza in the area, but this one is nipping on its heels.

Rock shrimp: if I had any blue ribbons left from my high school swimming career, I would send them to this pizza. It’s a white pizza — which means no tomato sauce — and it’s topped with rock shrimp, a slightly sweet roasted garlic cream sauce, slices of oven-dried tomato, spinach, and mounds of stretchy, melty, luscious mozzarella cheese. This is why everyone went crazy for Cosmos. They could stop offering every single other thing on the menu, and I wouldn’t bat an eye. As I snuck in one last bite, I crunched down on a shrimp shell — a mistake that I can overlook, but an unwelcome one nonetheless.

In a nod to nostalgia, Cosmos offers ice cream “in collaboration with Melting Moments.” We didn’t indulge, because obviously we had indulged ourselves right out of our comfortable levels of fullness already. Instead, we rolled ourselves home and dreamt of mozzarella cheese.