For years the cognoscenti's choice for Union Square happy hour snacking has been Morton's, the swellegant Chicago-borne steakhouse at Post and Powell, where the hungry imbiber can enjoy a complimentary and absolutely tender and smoky filet mignon finger sandwich (or two or six or seven) with her $15 martini.

Those freeloading days will draw to a close at the end of the month when the restaurant expands upstairs into the old Disney Store location, taking the bar and dining room with it. (The downstairs will host enhanced banquet facilities.) The good news is that the free sandwiches are being replaced with a brand-new happy hour menu of top-shelf burgers and such, each costing a mere $5. If those enormous 5-7 p.m. cocktails take a cut in salary as well, we guzzlers just might break even.

Celebrate mailing in your tax forms on Wednesday, April 15th by moseying over to Williams-Sonoma on Union Square (340 Post, 362-9450) at 5 p.m., where Top Chef's head judge, hunky-while-bald Tom Colicchio, owner of the many Craft restaurants and catnip to women and men alike, will be signing his new book 'wichcraft: Craft a Sandwich into a Meal -- And A Meal into a Sandwich. (Aka 'wichcraft for short.)

Tequila is big business. Worldwide sales exceed 10 million cases a year, and the US consumes about half of those. That explains how Don Julio / Diageo could afford to host a four-course dinner at Cortez (550 Geary) for local food writers featuring tequila cocktails invented by mixologist Brandon Skaggs and dishes created by chef Jenn Puccio.

The idea was to promote cocktail pairing along the lines of wine pairing. With one big exception, that didn't work for me. The food was great--particularly squash ravioli with smoked brussels sprouts and a crispy Kurobuta pork belly, both on the regular dinner menu--but the drinks were too sweet to go with it. I'd have preferred the tequilas straight, or better yet a few glasses of dry wine from the restaurant's excellent list.

The exception was the Cesar, Skaggs's radical, jalapeño- and cilantro-spiked variation on a Margarita. This not only paired well with various appetizers: it was one of the most delicious cocktails I've ever had. The drink is $11 at the bar. For the next couple of weeks, order one and you can get one of the snacks from the Bar Bites menu for another $2.

The recipe in the press handout was clearly wrong--the drink didn't include Grand Marnier, and six slices of jalapeño would have made it too spicy--so I visited Skaggs recently to get the real recipe, as well as a video demonstration of its preparation.

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The bar at Fifth Floor (12 4th St) isn't a place passers-by are likely to wander into by accident. To get there, you walk to the back of the Hotel Palomar lobby and take the elevator to, obviously, the 5th floor. This low profile means the cozy place is usually quiet, making it a good place to meet friends or unwind after shopping or events at nearby Moscone Center.
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The tiny lobby of 315 Sutter, a narrow, nondescript building a couple of blocks from Union Square, gives little clue that a short ride up the elevator leads to one of most esoteric gastronomic destinations in the world: Le Sanctuaire. This unique shop offers a selection of exotic spices, salts, vinegars, and other seasonings; sous vide baths, liquid nitrogen tanks, and other postmodern kitchen tools; molecular-gastronomy requisites such as sodium alginate, methyl cellulose, and maltiol; and a selection of imported books by chefs such as Hestor Blumenthal, Ferran Adria (in Spanish), and Nobu Matsuhisa (in Japanese).

The most popular seasoning currently is the house-made Vadouvan ($4 per ounce), a French variation on curry powder made by cooking onions, shallots, and garlic until they're almost dehyrdated, tossing them with a blend of 11 spices, and leaving the mix to ferment for at least a week. Unfortunately, we can't bring this to you in Smell-O-Vision: the aroma is incredible.

Above, a selection of hardware. Clockwise from top left: pastry funnel, CocktailMaster (demonstration video on YouTube), mandoline, citrus juicer, miniature press, food mill.
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One of the finest aspects of the urban holiday experience is meeting friends for a hot toddy in an elegant and festively decorated saloon: a modern-day variation on those ancient winter festivals our forebears conjured up to distance the damp, cold darkness.

My favorite rendezvous is the Big Four, a cozy little bar just off the Huntington Hotel lobby at Taylor and California, where the questing merrymaker can sip a perfectly crafted cocktail by the crackling hearth while the resident piano man noodles his way through the Vince Guaraldi songbook.

The city's finest hot buttered rum is prepared at the handsome new Clock Bar off the St. Francis lobby at Geary and Powell: sweet, spicy cream-laden rocket fuel in a sleek, slender package. The Grandviews Lounge atop the Hyatt Union Square offers toddies, eggnog and other holiday restoratives as well as a stellar view of the city 36 floors below, and Schroeder's on Front Street is an excellent source for hearty German ales and lagers and that Old World black-forest gemutlichkeit. Prosit! --Matthew Stafford