Yesterday, ICE alum Amy Eubanks, the Executive Chef at BLT Fish, returned to ICE to demonstrate some of her favorite fish dishes and discuss life in a restaurant kitchen for ICE students.

Eubanks graduated from the Culinary Arts program in 1999. She started working with Laurent Tourondel as an extern at Cello, where she ended up staying for two and a half years. While there she spent a year as poissonier, no small feat considering that the famed restaurant specialized in seafood. Because she wanted to learn how to cook meat, she then went to Cafe Boulud, where she worked with Daniel Boulud and Andrew Carmellini. When Tourondel opened BLT Steak in 2004, he hired her as a lead line cook, followed by a promotion to sous chef. Because of her strong seafood skills, she became sous chef of BLT Fish upon its opening, then chef de cuisine in 2006 and executive chef in March 2010. In 2010, she was inducted into the ICE Alumni Hall of Achievement for her accomplishments. More…

ICE Director of Career Services Maureen Drum Fagin and Career Services Advisor Deanna Silva with elBulli Chef Ferran Adria. Photo by Greg Nesbit Photography

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Last week, the gastronomy of Spain and its role in shaping worldwide culinary innovation, was celebrated in true style by none other than its highest practitioner, Chef Ferran Adrià. The event, which also served as a book launch for The Sorcerer’s Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at elBulli, by Lisa Abend, was presented by ICEX (The Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade) at NYU’s King Juan Carlos I Center in Manhattan.

The event kicked off with a speech by Miguel Sebastián, Spain’s Minister of Industry, Tourism and Commerce, on how Spain has shaped the world’s food culture. Lisa Abend then discussed her book, the daily life of elBulli interns (imagine pulling hundreds of individual pine nuts out of pinecones for the menu’s “risotto” course!), and what it means to hold a coveted stagiaire position at the world’s most renowned restaurant. (By the way, she noted that Adrià often says, a stage at his restaurant is even harder to secure than a reservation — over 3,000 candidates apply each year for around 32 unpaid six-month stage slots.) Two former elBulli stagiaires, including ICE’s own Paras Shah (Culinary ’07), spoke about their time in the elBulli kitchen, and how it’s impacted both their career and the way they think about food, craft, and creativity in general. More…

Last Thursday, the James Beard Foundation announced the semifinalists for their prestigious Restaurant and Chef Awards. Included on the list are ICE alumni Missy Robbins of A Voce in New York City for Best Chef: New York City and Rachel Yang of Joule in Seattle for Best Chef: Northwest. The final list of nominees will be announced on March 21 and we have our fingers crossed for both of these successful alumni. Both chefs are members of our Alumni Hall of Achievement and neither are strangers to awards. Yang was a James Beard Awards semifinalist for Rising Star Chef in 2009 and Best Chef: Northwest in 2010 and Robbins was selected as one of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs in 2010.

Also, Food & Wine will be naming a People’s Best New Chef in addition to their annual Best New Chef awards this year, and ICE alums are also nominated for this brand new award. Held in conjunction with CNN’s Eatocracy, the award will be given to a chef selected by the dining public. Among the highly-respected chefs are ICE alums Alex Pope of R Bar in Kansas City and James Holmes of Olivia in Austin. ICE alum Tiffany MacIsaac’s husband Kyle Bailey of Birch & Barley in Washington D.C. is also nominated for the award (MacIsaac heads up the restaurant’s pastry team). You can vote online anytime before March 1.

Good luck to these ICE alumni!

Whether as chefs, cake decorators, specialty food purveyors or caterers, ICE alumni are finding success in a plethora of different avenues in the food world. Check out just some of the alumni finding success and making recent headlines.

* Melissa Vaughan (Culinary ’01) and her husband Brendan wrote The New Brooklyn Cookbook. The couple and some of their recipes were highlighted in the Daily News.

* Kim O’Donnel (Culinary ’97) launched her new book, The Meat Lover’s Meatless Cookbook. The book was featured on The Washington Post, Serious Eats and The Huffington Post.

* Flannery Klette-Kolton (Culinary ‘08/Management ’08) was included in an episode of My Life in Food on the Cooking Channel. The show included her personal chef company, bigLITTLE, and their unique supper club dinners.

* Wine Director at Del Posto, Henry Davar (Culinary ’02) was part of the team that helped the restaurant earn their four-star review in The New York Times.

* Tiffany MacIsaac (Culinary ’02), pastry chef Birch & Barley in Washington, DC, has been named a 2010 DC Area Rising Star Chef by StarChefs.

* Ashton Warren (Pastry ’08) was featured in The New York Times’ two-star review of Marc Forgione for her “banana split sundae” and role as pastry chef.

* Annemarie Ahearn (Culinary/Management ’05), proprietor of Salt Water Farm, a farm-to-table cooking school on the coast of Maine, was included in the November issue of Food & Wine in the “40 Big Food Thinkers Under 40” story.

To connect with these ICE alumni and many more, join ICE’s network on LinkedIn, or follow ICE on Facebook and Twitter.

Tonight, Top Chef: Just Desserts will premiere on Bravo. ICE alumni Zac Young, Malika Ameen and Seth Caro will make their TV debut as contestants on the show. The show will be hosted by fellow ICE alum Gail Simmons and will feature appearances by well-known pastry stars such as Sylvia Weinstock, Sherri Yard and Michael Laiskonis. It promises to be a sweet season of watching chefs make cakes, cookies and other sweets.

We spoke with ICE alum Zac Young last week. Today, we take a look at Malika Ameen. Ameen graduated from ICE’s Culinary Arts program in 1997 before making the shift to the world of pastry. Now, she lives in Chicago with her three sons. She works as a pastry consultant and is starting an online cookie business, ByM Desserts. We asked about transition to pastry, her style and her time at ICE.

How did you make the shift to pastry?
My favorite part of the culinary program was the two weeks we spent doing pastry. I enjoyed that so much. I went to do my externship in Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Vong. Shortly after, I went to work with pastry chef Gina DePalma (also an ICE alum) at the Club Room. I just loved it so much and I never looked back. It really turned me on.

Does your culinary training set you apart from other pastry chefs?
I think savory chefs are terrified of pastry and vice versa. Pastry chefs are used to being in their own world. I enjoy both a lot. There are techniques in savory that can be easily used in pastry, which we are starting to see that more and more. My culinary training helps me to keep an open mind in the pastry kitchen. More…

The Top Chef: Just Desserts premiere is only a week away. ICE alumni Zac Young, Malika Ameen and Seth Caro are competing on the show. Alumni Hall of Achievement inductee Gail Simmons will act as host. The show will feature guest appearances by famed pastry professionals Sylvia Weinstock, Sherri Yard and Michael Laiskonis. The promise of watching chefs performing challenges involving wedding cakes, flaming desserts and chocolate showpieces has many people counting down the days till the debut of the Top Chef spinoff on September 15.

Before we binge on what is sure to be a delectable season of television, we indulged our sweet tooth by talking to competitor Zac Young. After graduating the Pastry & Baking Arts program at ICE in 2006, Zac went on to work at Bouchon Bakery and Butter. Now, he is the Executive Pastry Chef at the critically acclaimed Flex Mussels on New York City’s Upper East Side. There, he is responsible for a dessert menu that compliments the almost all seafood menu. To get a taste of what to expect from him on the new show, we asked him about his inspiration, the life of a pastry chef and his memories of his time at ICE.

You have a pretty interesting background. How did you get into baking?
My mom was a vegan, so she never baked. But I loved cookies. So I had to teach myself how to make them and it became an obsession. Before I was working in pastry, I was working in the wig department of the Radio City Rockettes. It definitely had certain creative aspects that translated to pastry. It gives you a feel for aesthetics and a visual sensibility that translates beautifully to plated desserts. More…

When ICE President Rick Smilow and Anne E. McBride wrote Culinary Careers: How to Get Your Dream Job in Food they discovered a plethora of food jobs they had never heard of before. Since the book’s release, they have been discovering even more interesting career paths in the food world. DICED shares some of them with you in a reoccurring feature, “Unique Culinary Careers.”

Among the chefs and entrepreneurs profiled in the book, there are several culinary careers in education. There are a multitude of career paths for instructors and teachers working in colleges or culinary schools, whether teaching career programs, recreational cooking classes or even working with private clients. In the culinary industry, an important part of education is invaluable experience that comes with working in restaurants. ICE’s Chef Instructors have worked in some of the country’s most prestigious restaurants. Recently, ICE welcomed alum (and Alumni Hall of Achievement inductee) Caryn Stabinsky to our roster of dedicated and experienced Chef Instructors. Chef Caryn first completed the Pastry & Baking Arts program at ICE before working at Oceana and wd-50. She is the Executive Pastry Chef at Monkey Bar, where she was part of the opening team. Before she starts using all that experience to help shape the next generation of pastry chefs, we asked her about her experiences in industry and designing a pastry menu.

How would you describe your job?
At Monkey Bar, I was the opening chef. I started here when they had nothing on the walls. One of the very first things I did was spend 2 weeks testing and developing recipes. The owners had a very clear idea of what they wanted in the dessert menu. The style is simple Americana. It was great because I’m a person who starts with a recipe and plays and messes with it until I get what I want. I did everything from scratch. Now, we make our own bread from our own recipe and an array of plated desserts. We make everything ourselves, including fresh ice cream and sorbet. More…