This past Monday night, ICE’s Career Services Department held a social and networking event for career program alumni. The venue was Beerparc, part of Foodparc in the new Eventi Hotel at 6th Avenue and 29 Street. The Sous-Chef at Beerparc/Foodparc is Brion Wong, an ICE Culinary Arts and Culinary Management alum from 2007. He provided an Oktoberfest spread for the group that included sausages, schnitzel and charcuterie as well as a selection of beers.

I enjoyed reconnecting or meeting many of ICE’s former students. The list includes Jeffery Palma (Culinary Arts/Culinary Management ’08), who is the junior sous-chef at Mario Batali’s restaurant Lupa. Jeffery is now the key cook at Lupa who trains new hires. Jewel John (Culinary Arts ’09) is also a trainer, in this case for Shake Shack. She recently returned from training at Shake shack openings in Dubai and Kuwait. 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 culinary career paths. DICED shares some of them with you in a reoccurring feature: “Unique Culinary Careers.”

If you live in New York, you may recognize Lauren Shockey as part of the team behind the food section of the Village Voice where she works as a food critic. Her job has her travelling to all corners of the city to taste and sample menus (all while trying to stay incognitio), but Shockey also travelled around the world learning to cook in four very different kitchens in New York City, Hanoi, Tel Aviv and Paris. She chronicled her experience in the food memoir, Four Kitchens: My Life Behind the Burner in New York, Hanoi, Ten Aviv, and Paris. We sat down and asked her about her experience and her life in the food industry.

How would you describe your job?
I am a staff writer at the Village Voice, the alt-weekly newspaper, where I write a weekly restaurant review and I blog daily about food and restaurant for the paper’s blog, Fork in the Road. I am also the author of Four Kitchens, a just-released culinary memoir of learning to cook in restaurants in New York, Hanoi, Tel Aviv, and Paris. More…