Caution: Not safe for significantly other’s eyes.

Sometimes good people do bad things. Like forget to make Valentine’s Day reservations. But luckily for those good people, there are a few fine establishments that will add just the right amount of sweetness to your day, without making you feel like a jerk for not making a reservation (because they don’t take them).

Step one: Pre-order your gifts and tintype portrait from E. Smith Mercantile. 

If you haven’t been to this beautiful, shining example of what it looks like when you open a store and do everything right and everyone loves you, you better make Valentine’s Day your first. They have turned themselves into a one-stop-shop for those of us less organized folk, offering flowers, a beautiful collection of essential oil perfumes, vegan chocolates and tintype portrait sessions. And you can pre-order your flowers and portraits today to make yourself feel a little better about the whole reservation thing. Go pick up your gifts on Friday morning starting at 10am and head back later that night to get your portraits taken.

Step two: Visit the My Sweet Lil Cakes food truck at Westlake Center between 11-3 on Valentine’s Day.

My Sweet Lil Cakes is an adorable, bright orange food truck that will change the way you think, eat and dream about breakfast foods. They wrap their homemade waffle batter around a menu full of different sweet and savory concoctions to create what they call, hotcakes on a stick. And what I call, Hawcacksa-astach (That’s me talking with my mouth full. Because even for you fine people, I couldn’t stop stuffing my face for long enough to say the name of the company.) So yes, the waffle things are good, and even better, My Lil Sweet Cakes is celebrating its one-year anniversary by giving away free sweet and savory hotcakes to the first 40 customers who visit them on Valentine’s Day. And yeah some of those customers will be vegan. They will order the one with green apples, caramel and pecans. And you should too!

Step three: Go back to E. Smith Mercantile for a drink.

One of the best parts of E. Smith (short for E. Smith Mercantile – it’s what I call them. We’re pretty close) is their back bar. Even if you decide to skip the stunning flower arrangements, and the 1000% fun tintype portraits, and the mouth-watering vegan chocolates and the simply wonderful perfumes, you should still go to the back bar. You do risk the chance of seeing lots of other people in the store having a wonderful time with their wonderful decisions to partake in the flowers and chocolates and portraits and such, but I think it’s worth the risk. The E. Smith back bar is so lovely, and the drinks are so tasty, you’ll still feel good about yourself, even with all the bad decisions you made.