Now that we’ve said that, we still know that sometimes you gotta celebrate. And sometimes simply being awake and alive is reason enough to do it. And if you must celebrate (musn’t you, after all?), is there not one vodkaless morning cocktail that perfectly pairs with eggs and toast? Of course, there is.

Everybody knows that a Mimosa is made with but three things: equal amounts of Sparkling Wine and Orange Juice, and a flute from which to sip it.

Unlike its barrel-chested cousin, the Screwdriver, Mimosas are delicate and playful, and because they’re not too potent, they can be consumed in plurality, without leaving you legless.

Best enjoyed during those elliptical conversations over leisurely late-morning brunches, there’s nothing quite like this whimsical punch cocktail to put a spring in your Sunday step.

So, when there’s a need to raise a glass and toast your friends, your family or just even the day’s beginnings, we’ll we’ve got plenty of Orange Juice, Sparkling Wine and flutes.

Cheers!

Made with a little bit of this and a little bit of that, it’s one of those make-it-with-whatever’s-on-hand, kitchen-sink dishes that almost always makes a great, fulfilling supper, as well as a great lunch the following day.

In other words, you really have to try really, really hard to screw up a meatloaf. It’s practically impossible. But just because it lends itself to pretty much everything doesn’t necessarily mean that making a mean meatloaf is a piece of cake.

To wit: sliced and served in pairs or trios, our Original Meatloaf is 10 ounces of ground beef, pork and (yes) veal, bound together with bread, eggs and mire poix, painted with a honied glaze, topped off with a roux-thickened brown gravy made from veal and chickens stocks and sprinkled with freshly cut chives.

Served to you with your choice of eight classic sides (shown here with bacon-braised kale), you might, by just looking at it, know full-well that there’s more than a good chance that, in order to save room for a boozy shake or a slice of pie, that you’re probably going to have to take home what you can’t finish.

Ergo: stretching that dollar. Because what’s better the following day (better even that cold pizza) than a cold meatloaf sandwich for lunch.

As people everywhere have known for centuries, not much.

Or the White Russian: dark, rich, creamy and, thanks to a 15-year-old movie, still unfailingly popular.

Could they be the most perfect of cocktails?

What about the Martini? To the most fastidious of cocktail connoisseurs, the Martini’s most certainly most perfect. In fact, for them, nothing really compares (they’ll also insist that there’s no such thing as a vodka Martini).

But if those are but examples of perfect and near-perfect cocktails, which cocktail is the most versatile? The most interchangeable? The roux from which countless cocktails can be made, all depending upon the whimsy of our moods?

Original bartender Lee Watson says that it is, hands down, the appropriately dubbed Last Word.

This four-ingredient, equal-parts, Prohibition-era cocktail concocted long ago at the Detroit Athletic Club lay dormant for some time, he says, before it was rediscovered and put back into the rotation by Seattle’s Murray Stenson, who tended bar for the Zig Zag Cafe during the vintage cocktail renaissance.

Comprised of gin, Green Chartreuse and Maraschino liqueurs and juice from freshly squeezed limes, all of which is shaken strained and served in a classic cocktail glass, the Last Word, he says is “a perfectly balanced cocktail.”

“But it’s also,” has adds, “a great template to play with to design other cocktails.” A good bartender, he says, can experiment using different gins, or swap them out entirely for something far different, like Aquavit or cachaça. Choosing different liqueurs, he says, will also vastly change the drink’s flavor profile, just as replacing the lime juice with the juice from an orange, a grapefruit or a lemon.

It’s a simple recipe, he says, and no matter how it’s spun, it will almost always retain the “the essence” of the Last Word.

Try one and see for yourself if we’re not on to something. Or choose your own adventure and ask your bartender to change it up some by offering a suggestion to see if you’re not, in fact, on to something.

Ice cream (and gelato) had been around a while (centuries, really), but it would still be a few more years before we started dressing them up like sundaes.

So, for a while, they were at an impasse. And then someone had a brilliant idea.

No one is certain who first made what would become known as the first parfait, but the French, and subsequently, everyone else, fell in love with it.

It was, in a word, perfect. Literally. Parfait, according to the O.E.D., translates, from the French, as “perfect.”

And what about this relatively new dessert was so perfect? Simply that it could be made with just the right amount of just about anything.

In its endless variations, the parfait, served in a tall glass and eaten with a long spoon, is a layered and striped dessert that can be made with cakes, fruits, whipped cream, yogurt, nuts, Jell-o, puddings, custards and anything else one might think fitting.

The next time you’re in, ask your server for the day’s parfait flavors, or stroll on up to our magical, rotating pastry case and have a looksy at the perfectly cold (but not too cold) winter dessert.

Besides, who screams ice cream in February, anyway?

For you see, that is the day that the reclusive and eccentric Willy Wonka opens his factory’s gates to the five lucky little boys and girls who found hidden in the wrapping of the chocolate bars they’ve purchased, Golden Tickets that in turn allowed them to gain entry to the world of chocolate waterfalls and Everlasting Gobstoppers.

So it makes some sense that, starting February 1, we initiated our own Golden Tickets program. Between now and the end of the month, we’re giving away, every day, three desserts to the finders of our Golden Tickets.

Join us for lunch or dinner, and when your host seats you, lift up the Daily Specials card attached to your menu and peek at its blank side. If the blank side’s not blank, that means it’s been stamped by our logo, which means you’ve found a Golden Ticket.

And this Golden Ticket you’ve found entitles you to a free dessert of your choice.

And the best part? There’ll be as many as three Golden Tickets randomly hidden out there during each meal, each day, just waiting for you to claim them.

In a month so often dedicated to love, this is just our way of saying, “We ♥ you.”

Because everybody, and we mean every body (excepting those with certain dietary restrictions) loves a good, grilled cheese sandwich.

But when you get down to it, anyone can make one. All you need is cheese, two slices of bread, some butter and some heat. The trick, though, to making a good one lies in the ingredients. And you know who makes one (*cough* *cough*)

We take two slices of Como Bread, a rustic white, from Grand Central, which we butter and heat until it’s crisp, brown and goldeny. And in between, are not just one, but two types of cheese (cheddar and gruyère).

And that’s pretty much all you need to make a good thing better. The real question, though, is how do you make a better thing best? How do you take something so perfect and wholesome and nostalgic and make it the most comforting of all comfort foods.

By pairing it. And Americans know how to pair things. Think peanut butter and jelly, cookies and cream, bourbon and branch, 501s and Chuck Taylors, Rogers and Hammerstein, Itchy and Scratchy.

And while we’ve got an intrinsic knack for pairing things, we know that you know that nothing goes better with a grilled cheese sandwich than a nice, hot bowl of tomato soup.

And you know who makes a mean tomato soup? We do. Every day.

Like the grilled cheese for which it’s made, the recipe for tomato soup is nearly as simple (ours is made with cream, onions, fennel and, of course, tomatoes). It’s the execution, though, that makes all the difference.

That this combo is an American favorite is something upon which everyone can agree. The only real aspect to consider is whether to dip, or not to.

Last summer, the young women in our sweets department brewed up an electric pink lemon-verbena soda, which we realized was perfect ingredient for the Tears of Isis, our twist on a sort of sister-cousin to the Caipirinha.

But summer’s long gone and the holidays are over, and while now may be the time to dream of equatorial beaches, we’ve still got several more months of clouds whose music we must still face.

So what better time than when the days are darkest and short to present you winter dreamers with a wintery sort-of sister-cousin to the Tears of Isis?

Courtesy, once again, of our cocktails and sweets teams, this collaborative invention is a sort of a second-couisin to the sister-cousins of the Caipirinha and Tears of Isis cocktails. All we did was swap out the lemon-verbena soda with a pomegranate-thyme soda.

That may sound simple enough, but the devil’s in the details, right? Among the new ingredients used to make up this festive pomegranate brew are lemon zest, cinnamon sticks, ginger, chili flakes and thyme.

Made with an earthy-tasting cachaça distilled in wooden and cooper vats by Boca Loca (which translates, literally, as “Crazy Mouth”), our Forbidden Fruit will help get you through your winter as you dream of the spring ahead.

And, being Americans, we’re very good at taking a good idea and borrowing it (some might call it appropriating or, more bluntly, stealing) and twisting it…just a little. And we do like our jams (but we like them better as jellies). And we like our crepes, but sometimes (almost always, it seems), we want them heartier, ergo: the buttermilk pancake.

But you know what we’ve got that no one else has got (actually they’ve all got it now, we just had to invent it first)? Thanks to George Washington Carver, we’ve got peanut butter.

Versatile, sweet, nutty, creamy peanut butter.

If you can’t yet tell where this is going, let us explain: why choose to eat for your breakfast the very respectable (read: sober and ordinary) buttermilk pancake, when you can choose to eat a whole plate of PB & J Pancakes?

How do we do it? We take those ordinary buttermilk pancakes, artfully present them as a randomly shuffled stack and spread on them a healthy schmear of peanut butter (which we cut with a small does of maple syrup).

But, like nearly all things, the magic’s in the jelly, in this case, a topographical trail of our housemade blueberry jelly.

And if that’s still not sweet enough for you, then please note that it comes with a trio of syrups (maple, seasonal berry and our housemade honey butter).

Really, what doesn’t vodka mix with?

There’s soda, of course, and tonic. There’s ginger ale (but ginger beer’s better, right?) lemonade, with iced tea, and, most certainly, tomato juice. It goes well with vermouth, grapefruit juice and even (so we’re told) Red Bull.

It basically goes with everything, especially any kind of fruit juice (think cranberry). It even goes well with cream (White Russians!).

So why not mix it with something fruity and creamy? And by something, we mean, why not shoot it in a milkshake?

What, after all, speaks more perfectly and plainly to our soda jerk ethos and aesthetic than by mixing that shot in our Seasonal Berry Milkshake.

Yep, the Berry Boozy is, in a few words, a shot of vodka and a vanilla milkshake into which we blend a handful of each berries (often blueberries, sometimes blackberries and raspberries, but almost always strawberries).

And if you want to put a (figurative) cherry on top, try one with a flavor-infused vodka, like one flavored with vanilla, or even something citrusy, like Absolut Mandarin or Grey Goose L’Orange.