The world of wine can be very intimidating for culinary students. Wine experts, much like chefs, speak their own language. From "terroir" to "tannins", this language can be confusing and alienating to the uninitiated.

On March 27th, Allagash co-founder Rob Tod and ICE Dean of Students Andrew Gold co-hosted the 12th annual Cookin' with Allagash Recipe Contest at ICE. At this much-anticipated event, sponsored by Allagash Brewing Company, ICE students competed for scholarship money to apply towards their culinary school tuition.

As the Dean of ICE's School of Business & Management Studies, Steve Zagor oversees one of the most innovative culinary business programs in the country. He has mentored countless alumni—from Jim Nawn of Agricola Eatery to Jason Soloway of Wallflower, Mark Sy of Vien to Christina Ha of Macaron Parlour. In fact, those four students-turned-entrepreneurs hail from just one of Steve’s graduating classes. Multiply their success by his 10+ years as a teacher (not to mention his lengthy career as a restaurateur and consultant) and you’ll get a ballpark idea of Steve’s undeniable impact on today's culinary industry.

The first thing you learn in culinary school is that being a chef is far more complex than most people realize. From your white commis cap down to your stiff-toed shoes, everything is designed for safety, efficiency and cleanliness. In fact, sanitation is the first subject you'll tackle, learning how factors from temperature to humidity, pH to protein content affect the safety of everything we cook. That may sound boring, but once you've studied the many ways improperly handled food can lead to illness, it's pretty fascinating how rarely we all get sick!

Consider the scene in your average home kitchen. Could a successful restaurant survive with only one sink to clean veggies, peel shrimp, rinse raw chicken, wash hands and rinse pet bowls? Or a reach-in refrigerator filled with perishables that is often left open for too long? What about a dog running around while the staff is working, or an untrained cook who licks his fingers after tasting the sauce? The same warm dreamy set that is the foundation of so many fond childhood memories is also the cauldron of bacteria where you are most likely to get “stomach flu"—or as professionals call it, "food poisoning".

A great bottle of wine—it often seems like such a simple pleasure. But the vision, planning, labor and skill required to infuse joy into every bottle is not always so apparent to the drinker.

Anytime you set out to do something that has never been done before, you can expect some people to react with confusion and fear. Especially if that involves messing with something that people have deep and personal opinions about, like food.

At ICE, our students come from a variety of different backgrounds and have a broad range of goals. The man or woman standing next to you in class could be a concert pianist, doctor, plumber, florist, marketing executive or a stay-at-home mother. Yet among the many fascinating life stories we've come across at ICE, alumnus Sharon Folta's is particularly memorable. After graduating from ICE, she has both pursued a career in healthful cooking as a Personal Chef/Cooking Instructor and authored a memoir, Little Satchmo, describing her experience growing up as the daughter of famed jazz trumpet player Louis Armstrong.

ICE was delighted to recently host a cooking demo with one of New York's true culinary phenoms, Chef Alex Stupak. Although only in his early thirties, Chef Stupak already has twenty years of industry experience under his belt. His professional career started in Chicago, where he worked at the award-winning, four-star restaurant Tru. Following his time in Chicago, Stupak went to work at The Federalist in Washington DC, and later, landed at Clio in Boston, where he gained national acclaimed for his talent as a pastry chef.

Since the coining of the first celebrity chef, there have been many professionals in the culinary and pastry fields that new students can look up to as role models. There are, of course, a number of brilliant female pastry chefs here in New York City—and around the world—whose work inspires the artist in me.