New York City Wine & Food Festival Celebrates 50 Years of Hip-Hop

The annual New York City Wine & Food Festival starts cooking in mid-October, but some celebrity chef dinners and classes are sold out already. So it’s not too soon to plan ahead, most notably for this year’s new grand finale. On Oct. 15, a tribute to Black chefs, their restaurants and cuisines and the 50th anniversary of hip-hop will wrap things up (pun intended): DJ Cassidy, Ice-T, Rev Run, DJ Mick, Tamron Hall and Angela Yee, the chef JJ Johnson and other chefs, will participate in the party with plenty of beats, food and drink.

Bacardi Presents the Cookout: Hip Hop’s 50th Anniversary Celebration, Oct. 15, 4 to 7 p.m., Pier 86 (West 46th Street), $135 ($175 for entry at 3:30 p.m.), nycwff.org.

More French Pastries for the Upper East Side

Magali Vanessa Silengo, a pastry chef from Provence, began selling her creations to coffee shops and fancy food stores in New York City about 10 years ago. Now, with her husband, Marc-Antoine Silengo, she has opened a pâtisserie on the Upper East Side, a neighborhood that has long welcomed French pastry shops. Signatures like a charlotte, in several flavors, and a classic cream-filled Tropézienne cake, along with macarons, financiers and canelés, are sold in a comfortable modern setting with tables in a building built 135 years ago.

Pâtisserie Vanessa 1340 Lexington Avenue (89th Street), patisserievanessa.com.

Heaven’s Door, the spirits company that counts Bob Dylan as a founder, has introduced Ascension Kentucky Straight Bourbon, a blend of two Kentucky Straight Bourbons. It marks the opening this fall of the company’s own Six Mile Creek distillery, in Pleasureville, Ky., for private tours and events. (It will open to the public in 2024.) which has been making whiskeys on a limited basis since 2017. A restaurant and visitor center, the Last Refuge, is opening in downtown Louisville this fall. Ascension is honeyed, buttery and toasty, with hints of seared orange peel and a silken finish, designed for sipping. The bourbons are aged five years before blending and bottling. The label has a design showing Mr. Dylan’s ironworks.

Ascension Kentucky Straight Bourbon, heavensdoor.com, $54.99 for 750 milliliters.

The Jewish Cooking of Rome

Jewish food? You might think latkes or bagels. But in Rome it’s artichokes. Fried artichokes Roman-style are called carciofi alla Giudia, and the best place to enjoy them, crispy leaf by crispy leaf, is in restaurants in the ancient Jewish quarter lining the Via del Portico d’Ottavia. Jewish settlement and cooking in Rome dates back 2,000 years, when the first Jews arrived. Sephardim from Spain followed later, and in more modern times, Libyan Jews from a country once occupied by Italy. In her well-researched cookbook, “Portico: Cooking and Feasting in Rome’s Jewish Kitchen,” Leah Koenig, a food writer, shares recipes from these groups. Liven up the table at Rosh Hashana, which starts the evening of Sept. 15, with tastes like braised chicken with velvet peppers and tomatoes, and for break-the-fast after Yom Kippur, a lemony almond cake with caramelized fruit. Ms. Koenig will be interviewed by Deb Perelman on Sept. 7 from 7 to 9 p.m. at Powerhouse Arena, 28 Adams Street (Water Street), Dumbo, Brooklyn, followed by a tasting in a program for the Neighborhood: An Urban Center for Jewish Life.

“Portico: Cooking and Feasting in Rome’s Jewish Kitchen” by Leah Koenig (WW Norton); $7.18 for the talk, $44.52 with the book, powerhousearena.com.

A KitchenAid Mixer Upgrade

In 2008 New Metro Design, in Duncansville, Pa., introduced the BeaterBlade, adding a flexible spatula edge to the flat paddle attachment for KitchenAid stand mixers. (Mine has withstood 15 years of use.) It gave the beating process a more precise swipe along the inside and bottom of the mixing bowl. And now they’ve improved it, making it from metal instead of plastic but with the same flexible blades. There are sizes to fit various KitchenAid models, and each comes in a few colors minus old-fashioned white.

BeaterBlade Metal, $40.95 to $49.95 depending on model, beaterblade.com.