Over the past 10 years, the number of bean-to-bar chocolate operations in the United States has grown exponentially. Yet no American culinary school has invested in a chocolate lab where pastry students and seasoned professionals can experience the full cycle of bean-to-bar production…until now.

According to culinary star Alex Guarnaschelli, ICE alum Michael Jenkins entered her restaurant as the “worst intern she ever had.” Ten years later, Michael is running Guarnaschelli’s kitchen as the executive chef at Butter restaurant in New York City.

Like the old phrase, the second module of the Culinary Arts program at ICE is literally a lesson on taking—or rather, managing—heat in the kitchen. For me, that meant facing my fears—of fire and overcooking proteins—and learning a lot more about cooking, and myself, in the process.

When it comes to innovation in the restaurant world, few challenges have been as important as the public’s growing interest in nutrition and wellness. Of all the New York City kitchens to respond to this call for healthier cooking, few have gained as much attention as the Michelin-starred Rouge Tomate.

A lot has been happening at ICE since the school took up full-time residence at Brookfield Place in May. For me, the most exciting element has been the creation of our new Culinary Technology Lab. Before your mind runs wild with cartoonish images of mad scientists in chef hats or smoking beakers full of neon liquids, let me explain.

As the pastry chef behind jewelry-inspired bakery Mini Melanie, ICE Culinary Arts alum Melanie Moss serves up some of the most stylish treats in NYC. But before she was catering the city’s most chic parties and designing cakes that are almost too pretty to eat, Melanie trained in some of the country’s most famous restaurant kitchens.

Working your way up the professional ladder in the kitchen is a wonderful experience, filled with constant exposure to new cooking techniques, methods of organizational management and learning how to work with a team to execute the day’s work. It’s the type of work that never gets old, at least not for me.

So you want to be a chef, but don’t know if you’ll like working in restaurant kitchens? Well, what if restaurant experience could be a powerful tool in launching a less traditional career in food? That’s what happened for ICE Culinary Arts graduate Alex Laudeman, who now works on the culinary development team for one of NYC’s hottest food delivery startups, Maple.

To understand the operations side of a professional kitchen is to visualize a complex culinary systems theory, to speculate how one good or bad decision can affect all of the other moving parts. The century-old kitchen structure codified by Auguste Escoffier — still practiced today — evokes the blueprints for a battle scenario. This brigade consists of a chef (always referred to as “Chef” — rarely by his or her name) as the general at the helm with captains (sous chefs), various specialists (fish or meat cooks) and foot soldiers (line cooks) branching out beneath him. Even the physical setup of cooking “on the line” resembles operations in a heavily fortified trench.

Recently, in the first session of my Introduction to Wine class at ICE, a student posed the question that plagues many new wine drinkers: “What makes a wine good or great?” The question was more than fair, considering we had spent the evening tasting a variety of wines and noting the worthy qualities of their differing characteristics. Light, heavy, young, old, dry, sweet — could they all be good? Well, the short answer is yes.