Rosewater: Libations for The Niche

     Drive down Clear Lake City Boulevard and you'll barely notice it.  To the residents of Clear Lake City, or Webster, Texas, a Southeast suburb of greater Houston, the road is just a daily tributary from 45, a way to get home to the upper-middle crust neighborhoods that inundate the area; a simple means to respite at the end of a hard day's labor.  Blink, and you'll miss it.  But to the aesthetically trained eye, the adequately spaced serifed font in all caps and an art deco style will grab you:
R O S E W A T E R.
     The high end bar offering moderately priced custom designed cocktails sits humbly on no more than 1,500 square feet, but enter through the glass door and immediately you'll see why it is special.  Literally hundreds, if not more than a thousand, varieties of rare and barely-spoken-of liquors, wines, beers, and mixers grace shelves that span from waist high to ceiling.  Oh, and don't forget the wall of living moss, a beautiful tribute to nature and modern vertical planting, as you enter on your right.
     Pasha, the owner and proprietor of Rosewater, a young thirty-something with an unassuming demeanor, speaks proudly yet humbly of his niche creation.  "What we really want, that's what we want:  for people to come in and be greeted by people who like what they do [and who] know the menu..."  How hard is that to do?  According to Pasha, finding proficient bartenders was one of the hurdles he knew he had to get over in order to craft the perfect business.  "It's hard to find people who want to work in this environment and can do a good job."  But if you've been to Rosewater, you'll know that he's succeeded.  A small staff of 3-5 keep the bar going, and are always knowledgeable enough and willing to talk about whatever drink you order off their custom crafted menu.  And get your reading glasses on when it comes to selections:  there are a lot of choices.
     It's a bar we frequent, being residents of the Clear Lake area for a couple of years now, and what this bar does in terms of innovation and atmosphere is incomparable to any other bar business in the Houston area.  We were there on New Year's 2018, St. Patrick's Day, you name it, and each special holiday--even each week--boasts a brand new menu with new custom-created cocktails.  If you like citrusy, they've got it.  If you like fancy, try a touch of their drinks with egg white dressing the top.  If you like whiskey, bourbon, absinthe, this bar is the epitome of variety and unbeatable standards for all of these drinks and more.
    The reason for this je ne sais quoi guests feel when they spend an evening out at Rosewater can be attributed to Pasha, Rosewater's creator.  Pasha has spent the bulk of ten years collecting rare and interesting varieties of drinks and began experimenting with mixing cocktails at home.  Before opening the bar, he had rooms full of liquor, giving him an ever so slight insecurity when it came to hosting more conservative guests.  "We had some people stay over once...and they were somewhat devout Muslims...all I had to offer them was this guest room that had wall to wall liquor, and I was kind of like...Sorry!"  Yet despite any judging eyes from a more conservative contingent, Pasha pushed forward, and found the perfect spot for his brainchild in the unassuming Clear Lake suburbs, in a shopping center flanked by hair dressers, take out restaurants, and the occasional food truck.
     Pasha works a full time job.  "I am usually here on the weekends," he says.  If you ever feel like you have too much to do and too little time to do it, try working a regular 9-to-5 job then running a high end business in your spare time.  Pasha also juggles time with his girlfriend, who frequently comes to the bar when she has a chance.  "That's kind of the only way we get to see each other."
    This is the story of a man with a dream.  This is the story of following that dream to fruition and creating an ambience that everybody, young and old, wants to be a part of.   This is the story of indie music from all corners of the country and world being played on a carefully picked playlist to keep the mood going while you sip on absinthe from a $100 bottle or on Italian Aperitivo Cocchi.  And to add spark to the fire of creativity, add generosity to this man's trait list:  when we asked him to help us design a cocktail for our wedding, he was more than willing to give us his advice on what to add and what to scale back on.
    If drinkers want to be in the midst of something cool, delicate, detail-oriented and truly special, then they will not go far amiss taking a seat at the bar of Rosewater.  Friendly faces will be sure to greet you, and you won't be surrounded by countless yuppies cloistered off in corners.  You just might, though, find yourself facing one or two anthropomorphic goat paintings under recessed lighting in line for the bathroom.  It's all part of the uniqueness that defines this very establishment.  And in a world increasingly imbued with sameness despite the thirsts of its creative souls, a little uniqueness and specialty might be just what to order next from the proverbial bartender.


Erika Haines

New York

New York will,

Like the cliché,

Chew you up,

Spit you out

Then make you turn back

And miss it.

By then it’s too late

To save face;

It’s made you loyal,

Die-hard; true blue

So that you want nothing but

Grey-and-navy pinstripes to win

Even if you find baseball

Boring, albeit All-American.

Swanky:  Now you get to brag

To all your friends back home

That you once lived in New York:

Living the dream!

Though the idea of finding an agent

And struggling to perform there

Seemed more repulsive 

the further you grew away from 

K-12 theater competitions.

Your college friends now are all

Still out there, back East:

Living the dream!

You hear fragmented details

About their lives through

LinkedIn updates, word of mouth:

Grad school, marriage, start-ups—

Brilliant.

These are the 1-3 carat diamonds

You search for now 

on conflict-free websites:

Competing now in 

size, cut, and clarity.

It makes you wish you would’ve said

“God, I really love my friends”

Too, publicly, on your own LiveJournal.

But these are just hints of regret:

Mostly you’re just proud 

You got to be part of

The living, breathing machine

Billions of tiny moving things

Bickering, working in tandem to

Outperform every other city

No matter where you go.

Even if you never go anywhere 

Else ever again.

It was louder then, 

More cramped 

and desperate.

Still, you settle for your war cries

When familiar word comes in on the radio,

Hailing alongside the broadcast

In misty nostalgia:

New York, 

New York.

Chanting in perceived unison:

New York, 

New York.

Even when it’s only you

In the room who cares:

New York, 

New York.

A Post-Childhood Assessment of Childhood Book-Made-Film The Secret Garden

     I just finished watching The Secret Garden, the film based on the 1911 novel by Francis Hodgson Burnett, for the three thousandth time; but I hadn't seen this movie since I was younger than around twelve.  After the score by Zbigniew Preisner kicked in my first tear fell.  After that it was pretty much an endless stream of nostalgic/quarter-life-crisis tears every time the music struck up again, or little Mary Lennox, played by the now-elegant once-half-pint Kate Maberly, would start to speak in inquisitive or metaphorical terms about gardens, much to my chagrin.  I know exactly what it is that does it for me about this movie:  it is purely and simply visually and sonically stunning.  Whether a child or adult, and I knew this watching it as a kid, it is a perfect film.


     In case you're not as familiar with the story as I am, the majority of the film takes place on an estate in the British countryside, where a ten-year-old Indian-born British émigré girl has come to live upon the death of both of her parents in an earthquake.   She is surrounded by coldness from an early age -- severe neglect and isolation from her well-to-do aristocrat parents, followed by the icy "hospitality" Mrs. Medlock, played by Dame Maggie Smith, shows her upon her arrival to Misselthwaite Manor--and so grows used to being emotionally closed off, like the garden in question. 

     The dialogue in these films reminds me of the scripted dialogue in the late nineties/early 2000's WB television series Dawson's Creek, if you are old (or young) enough to remember it-- and before you laugh, or perhaps concurrently with your laughter-- give me a mere moment to explain.  In Dawson's Creek, a series of interactions would occur in which young people would appear capable of speaking in vocabularies far beyond their maturity level, dealing with issues and emotions statistically far beyond their maturity level--and though this made for a vulnerable-for-ridicule categorization to some, in my not-so-humble opinion, it made a much deeper plot and dialogue structure thus possible. Much the same in The Secret Garden; which is why I enjoy both.

     Perhaps, and I say this without reservation, it is also my nostalgia for childhood gardening, contemporary appreciation for horticulture, permaculture, and gardening in general, as well as my love of large, sweeping, Ansel-Adams-esque landscapes, that send me into a dreamy whirlwind of escape and reverie.  That said, some of the stop-motion capture of plants taking root beyond the gated garden walls, and the lilies and carnations blooming are positively breath-taking and intoxicating, and somewhat ahead of their time--almost out of place in the dusty, antique context of the film.

     The period costumes and set are to die for, and watching Dame Maggie Smith (before she was donned a Dame by British royalty)  in action is always a treat.  Misselthwaite Manor was the Downton Abbey before the popularization of Downton Abbey, if ya get me--though she is no hoity-toity Dowager in The Secret Garden--she plays a head caretaker, the "downstairs help" in the 1993 children's classic.

     In conclusion, I will never get tired of watching films from my youth that entranced me, less this one, and films like these (and there are few that measure up in degrees of nostalgia and ability to strike an emotional chord) will probably never stop having that effect on me.  In fact, quite the opposite is probably true. The Secret Garden boasts a magnificent child-like score, hits on all my visual sensibilities, and highlights parallels in my own life in themes of childhood isolation, innocence ignited, passion for the outdoors, creation and beauty, and reconnecting with distant relatives at unpredictable times; which makes it three-for-three on my cinematic scoreboard.


. . . . .

Erika S. Haines
2015