Like many Culinary Arts students, alum Anthony Jackson turned to ICE in pursuit of a new, creative career. Combining his prior public relations experience with his newfound kitchen skills, he quickly found a position as the social media manager & communications associate at Chef Michael White’s celebrated Altamarea Group. Read on to learn how Anthony found a culinary career full of more variety and excitement than he ever expected.

What’s the latest news from ICE's New York campus? The Chocolate Lab at ICE’s new facility is fully operational, and chocolate making on our bean-to-bar Cacao Cucina equipment has begun in earnest. Large and small batches are ready for tasting, featuring beans from a wide range of origins, including the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Trinidad and the Ivory Coast. And after many a dark chocolate batch, our first milk chocolate just rolled off the assembly line with a heady 50% cocoa solids.

Cake designer Karen Portaleo and pastry chef Susan Notter first met in 2011 for the television series Halloween Wars on Food Network. Their inspired cake and sugar work earned them an incredible $50,000 prize, building on both chefs’ already impressive resumes. On October 18-20, we’re thrilled to invite them to reimagine the art of Halloween centerpieces in a Carved Cake and Sugar Showpiece workshop at ICE. We caught up with Chef Notter in advance of the class to learn what inspires her custom sugar work.

“Before there was talent, there was passion,” says ICE alum and Food Network Star contestant Dom Tesoriero of his path to culinary success. “I was 18 and my friends would just show up at the house with bags of ingredients—I wasn’t skilled, but I knew how to make food taste good.”

When ICE alum Inez Ribustello left her small hometown in North Carolina to move to New York City, she never imagined that she would return. Yet when her illustrious career as a sommelier and beverage director at New York’s famed Windows on the World came to a halt in the aftermath of 9/11, Inez found new opportunities back home.

Working in the restaurant industry has always been in Andrew Rigie’s blood. Today he may be among New York City’s most knowledgeable experts on restaurant regulations, compliance, and trends, but his beginnings in the industry were more humble: baking and mopping the floors at his family’s local cafe.

As the director of special projects at Union Square Events, the catering and venue hospitality division of Danny Meyer’s celebrated Union Square Hospitality Group, ICE alum Omri Green is working at the pinnacle of the food and beverage industry.

In the culinary industry, there’s more than one road to success. While many culinary students dream of working for the Food Network, some of the most celebrated and respected chefs in the industry don’t have names or faces that you’ll regularly see on TV. In fact, most chefs go to work with a drive to be creative, to have an outlet to make food every day and to share their passion with others—not to become famous. If you’re a current ICE student, it’s wise for you to learn the names of some of these unsung heroes—the restaurant chefs who push our industry forward each and every day.

As I transitioned away from life as a full-time restaurant pastry chef three years ago, my goal was to create, in part, a day-to-day routine that was, well, different each day. My role as creative director at ICE certainly provides a wide range of pastry projects and endless possibilities for research, but that role was also conceived with a flexibility that encourages special side projects. These very diverse projects not only fulfill me and expand my own knowledge base, but they also enhance what I can offer ICE students from an educational perspective.

After months of hands-on lessons in ICE’s kitchens, my classmates and I were reaching the culmination of our education: the completion of an externship of our choosing. In preparation for this real-world experience, my classmates and I had spent months researching different restaurants or culinary businesses and trailing. Yet even with the most extensive research, the externship itself can often be very different than expected.