BARBARA LYNCH's newest venue, Stir, is one of the best ideas to come to the South End. Tucked on Waltham Street in the South End (across from Lynch's B&G Oysters and next to Plum, her produce shop), Stir is a teensy gem of a space with a demonstration kitchen and cook's library full of hard-to-find cookbooks and staff favorites. The kitchen seats 10 around the cook top, and will be your ringside seat for classes, demonstrations, wine and food tastings, and recipe testing. The wine-and-beverages classes on Mondays (led by No. 9 Park's Cat Silirie) and cooking classes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays all meet at 7 p.m. and cost around $100-plus, including wine, food, and priceless professional secrets. Upcoming classes include "Summer Tomatoes" on August 28 and 29; "The Cocktail Meets Plum" on September 3; and "Summer Corn" on September 4 and 5. >> Joining Rocca on Harrison Avenue is Gaslight Brasserie du Coin, the newest French-inspired eatery from the Aquitaine Group team. The name means the "brasserie on the corner," and the price point and food - including beef short ribs, steak frîtes, pressed sandwiches, onion soup, and salade Niçoise - are targeted to make the people who live around the corner feel right at home. >> There are fun things happening over in Cambridge, too. For example, there's the perfect dinner-and-a-movie night: a screening of The Real Dirt on Farmer John, a film by Taggart Siegel, which opens on September 7 at AMC Loews in Harvard Square. The film follows John Peterson's astonishing journey from Illinois farm boy to counter-culture rebel to third-generation farmer who almost lost the family farm. Today, his farm, Angelic Organics, is one of the largest Community Supported Agriculture farms in the country. Follow up the film with dinner at Harvest, where you can welcome new executive chef Mary Dumont, a native of New Hampshire and the first chef from that state to be honored by Food & Wine magazine as a Best New Chef (2006). Dumont was most recently executive chef at the Dunaway Restaurant at Strawbery Banke. >> Puzzled by the references to various flora, fauna, flotsam, and jetsam that appear in wine notes? What is "fruity" and what is not? What is a dry wine? Join Brookline Liquor Mart's Roger Ormon at Boston University on September 17, from 6 to 8 p.m., as he introduces you to the art of wine tasting. Practice identifying the aromas that are often mentioned in wine descriptions. A small tasting will round out the evening, so you can put your new wine vocabulary to work immediately. The class is $40.
