Find out how, for one weekend only, the legendary Cosmo Cafe will be bustling once more

These memories of a much-loved place of refuge and refreshment are from Professor Walter Gratzer, who emerged from wartime internment on the Isle of Man to become a distinguished biophysical chemist, and playwright and actor Jack Klaff. To these I add my own, for my parents took me there for treats when I was a child.

The Cosmo first opened as a coffee bar in 1937 and became a home from home for those forced to flee the Nazi violence spreading through Europe. But the Cosmo’s heyday was the 40 plus years from 1955, when it was taken over by Adi and Herta Manheimer, who had fled to London in the 1930s. At the Cosmo Restaurant and Café, the Manheimers offered generous portions of signature dishes such as Wiener schnitzel and Hungarian goulash. Its food was “the best value in town”, according to Professor Gratzer.

The Cosmo closed down in 1998, to the universal regret of its clientele. But now, for one weekend in November, it will be brought to life again, recreated in a church hall yards from its original home. The Ballad of the Cosmo Café is a musical celebration of the eatery, created from the memories of its former clientele and Marion Manheimer, daughter of the owners, and drawing on the many articles that have been written about it.

The production is the brainchild of theatre maker and artist Pamela Howard and is part of the year long Insiders/Outsiders Festival, that celebrates the contribution made to Britain by the refugees who fled Nazi Europe. Pamela and her collaborator, the playwright Philip Glassborow, put out a call via key organisations including AJR (Association of Jewish Refugees) and JR itself, and memories came flooding in. To these Howard added her own recollections of hours spent there from the late 50s.

When I meet her at her Sussex seaside studio, she shows me her intriguing first sketch of the café’s interior that will become the stage design for the show. “I was a provincial girl from Birmingham studying at the Slade School of Art. I used to walk up Finchley Road early in the morning to Swiss Cottage station. I would look in the window of this café, where I saw all these ‘old people’ and I thought who are they? One day I plucked up courage and went in, crouched in a corner and took out my sketchbook. As I was drawing four ladies playing cards and fully dressed in their finery at 8am, I became aware of an old man watching me. He said ‘Are you drawing me?’ I said ‘No I’m drawing those ladies…’

Pamela chatted to him and found out he was Polish. “He said: ‘I’ve been here for 30 years and now I know how to go from Crickleyvitch to Wimblybush, and back again without a hitch.’ I’ve put that in the piece.” She points at a figure in the drawing “Here he is. He’s called Lewandowski and is played by Frank Barrie. I’ve got a wonderful group of ‘senior actors’”.

Pamela got to know Lewandowski and he told her about the denizens of the café. “It became clear that it was a kind of club,” she says. Many lived nearby, in and around Canfield Gardens, where houses now worth millions were divided into bedsits. “The tenants had a bedroom and a shared bathroom on the landing but no kitchen.” Luckily the Cosmo opened at 8am so they could eat breakfast there. Pamela continues: “They had no money so they used to sit with a cup of coffee all day long. There were psychoanalysts without any patients – one always carried baskets containing all her former clients’ records. I have included her in my sketch. Another character in the piece (played by Stephen Greif) has been proofing his book for 40 years but it will never be published…” She points to the bridge table in her drawing. “The card players will be played by four singers. We have a group of lyric writers so the work will be a ‘singspiel’, eliding from speech into song.”

She points to a slim male figure in the sketch. “This is the young head waiter whose character is partly based on a Spanish waiter who went on to become the famous flamenco guitarist Paco Peña. He is played by Argentian actor Santiago Del Fosco, a recent graduate of Central School of Speech and Drama. But it is not a documentary. It’s an imagined memory.”

Howard’s imagination was fired by discovering that famous local resident Sigmund Freud was a frequent visitor in the café’s early days. She has resurrected the psychoanalyst in the form of a ghost, played by Jack Klaff, who revisits his favourite ‘haunt’.

Klaff himself discovered the Cosmo when he rented a room off Finchley Road. “I remember sitting on those little chairs. I went there a lot to have coffee, write and hang out. I used to bump into intellectuals, stragglers, writers. There was plenty of good conversation. I sat there for hours writing. I remember this woman saying to me, ‘You! I know your work! You’re in the Jewish tradition!’ And I said ‘No, I don’t think I am – I’m very much against the Jewish tradition.’ She said ‘That is the Jewish tradition!’. The Cosmo was special. I was appalled when it closed.”

The Cosmo may be no more, but when I visited Marion Manheimer, now a textile and print designer, she showed me newspaper articles, photographs and illustrations that vividly conjured her parents’ beloved venture. “Two thirds of the floor space was occupied by the Cosmo restaurant and one third by the coffee bar. If you wanted a quiet conversation you sat in the restaurant. But if you wanted to overhear other people’s conversations and interrupt them, you sat in the coffee bar!” she says.

We leaf through her evocative photographs. “This is the coffee bar. There’s my father lurking behind the Gaggia coffee machine. He was born in Hungary but grew up in Berlin. My mother was Viennese, her father was Czech Jewish but her mother was Catholic. They wanted to create a haven. That’s why the plaque that was put up in 2013 to commemorate the Cosmo was dedicated to the ‘survivors of The Holocaust’ [a plaque to mark the café is now on the Sprinkles wine bar that occupies the original site].”

Her father was also a food importer. Marion says that when he visited Spain to bring back citrus fruits he also brought people back with him to work in the café. “It was a way of getting them out of Franco’s Spain,” she says.

She shows me a photo of her darkhaired, smiling mother, with customers lighting up cigarettes in the background. “A man called Richard Levine – a psychic and pianist – who wrote hits for Max Bygraves, used to sit in the bar with a cigarette that dropped ash down his blazer. He regularly shouted at my mother ‘Venn do we haff our piano?’ He never got it. It would have been a conversation stopper. People would have thought it rude to talk while he played”.

Another photo brings back my own memories of the place. It shows the net curtains on the windows that made it feel like a home from home, tables laid with immaculately starched white cloths and white linen napkins – properly folded. “I remember being taught how to fold them by the manager. Writing out the menus was also my job,” says Marion. We share memories of our favourite dishes. I loved the golden schnitzels. “I miss the pastries,” says Marion wistfully. “The bakery at the back made Danish pastries and croissants.” She shows me a picture of a woman looking aghast at the café facade, bewildered by the closure notice and for sale sign: “We had to shut it from one day to the next with no warning. It was so much loved.”

Now, like so many other aficionados of the Cosmo, she is looking forward to seeing her memories come to life again.

By Judi Herman

The Ballad of Cosmo Cafe runs Saturday 16 & Sunday 17 November. 3pm & 7pm. £16. St Peter’s Church Hall, NW3 4HJ. http://insidersoutsidersfestival.org

This article also appears in the Oct 2019 issue of JR.