“Is New York Too Expensive for Restaurateurs?” read the recent New York Times headline. What’s going on here? Are we about to experience a restaurant Armageddon? To read recent well-written and thoughtful stories in The New York Times and New York Post about the extremely challenging New York business environment for new and existing restaurants, one would think we are on the threshold of a cataclysmic event. Will our lives be mostly composed of delivered meal kits and food courts?

For the ICE blog “Life as a Student” series, we hand the mic to students from our career programs and give them the chance to share what it’s really like to be a student at ICE. Our newest student blogger, Brooke Bordelon, a California transplant with Louisiana roots, is a student in ICE’s Culinary Arts program with her sights set on the food media realm.

Make sure your champagne (or seasonal cider) is on ice because we’ve got some celebrating to do: The Institute of Culinary Education has been named “The Best Culinary School in America” by The Daily Meal, a leading food and lifestyle website — and was awarded the same title by The Best Schools and EDinformatics. Add to this being named as one of America’s top culinary schools by FSR Magazine, and it goes without saying, it’s been an exciting year for the ICE community.

As we look back at the latter half of the 19th century, continuing the results of historical research I’ve posted here and here, we arrive upon what might be considered the “golden age” of chocolate manufacturing in Manhattan. We see what began as a localized industry concentrated in lower Manhattan shift from small-scale “independent” makers to the greater reach of regional and nationally known brands, whose sizable factories often took up the length of a city block, moving uptown as the city continued to grow in size and influence.

Sous vide cooking is one of the fastest growing trends in modern cooking, among restaurant chefs and home cooks alike. Despite the fact that sous vide was first used in restaurants around the same time that microwave ovens hit the market for home cooks, it’s still viewed as a very new technology. But one thing that has really changed about sous vide over the past 40 years is the price.

Chocolate: where most people see a tasty treat for immediate consumption, Chef Ebow Dadzie sees a world of possibilities for his next creation. A chef instructor at Monroe College and pastry chef for the New York Marriott Marquis Hotel, Chef Ebow has earned a host of praise for his chocolate artistry — named as one of the Top 10 Pastry Chefs in America by Dessert Professional magazine in 2015; awarded the honor of Most Influential Pastry Chef by the Black Culinary Alliance in 2012; named pastry chef of the year by Paris Gourmet in 2007; and more.

In the international culinary scene, Spain is hot right now...white-hot. With a rich culinary history going back hundreds of years and local chefs who continually push the boundaries of modernist cuisine, Spanish cuisine offers a rarely seen depth and diversity — and the culinary community agrees. Three of the top 10 restaurants on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list call the Iberian peninsula home. In celebration of Spanish cuisine, ICE has partnered with Eat Spain Up to bring two of the country’s best chefs, Mario Sandoval and Toño Perez, to the kitchen classrooms of ICE. This is the second series of courses in our Advanced Culinary Center program.

Julie Resnick (Culinary Arts) didn’t start the feedfeed with the goal of creating a behemoth crowdsourced food Instagram account with a following of over one million enthusiastic foodies. Her initial motive was simply to swap recipe ideas and to find inspiration for ways to use her weekly allotment of CSA (community supported agriculture) goods. Something like, How about a new way to prepare those sweet potatoes? But her education from ICE — which helped give her the ability to recognize truly good food and innovative preparations of it — along with her background in digital marketing, led to the creation of a community that self-selected foodies and talented photographers were clamoring to join.

Sometimes it’s okay to reinvent the classics, as long as it tastes as good or better than the original. This brittle recipe is just as delicious as your classic brittle, but with a tasty, seasonal addition: pumpkin seeds. Before I share the recipe, here’s an overview of this sweet, crunchy treat.

“Generation Chef: Risking It All for a New American Dream,” a new book by journalist Karen Stabiner, is an insider’s look at the first year of operation of Huertas, Jonah Miller’s Spanish restaurant in the East Village. Karen was granted open access to Huertas – the kitchen, management meetings, applying for licenses, and other trials and tribulations of the first year of restaurant ownership.