Institute of Culinary Education: programs, campuses, the French Culinary Institute legacy, who gets in, and what Michelin starred chefs say

The Institute of Culinary Education is the New York option, and since 2020 it has also been the keeper of the French Culinary Institute’s legacy, which means that two of the city’s culinary histories now run through one school. This page sets out what ICE is, how its programs are built around a final externship, who it admits, and what each school’s alumni have done. Fees and start dates are left out; the school’s site carries them.

What the school is

ICE began in 1975 when Peter Kump started teaching basic technique in his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The school moved to East 92nd Street in 1979, launched its culinary career training program in 1983, and in 1986 brought in Nick Malgieri to start a professional baking program. After Kump’s death, Rick Smilow acquired the school in 1995. It received accreditation from the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges in 2000, took the name Institute of Culinary Education in 2001, and moved in 2015 to 225 Liberty Street in Battery Park City, winning the IACP Culinary School of the Year award the same year. The Los Angeles campus opened in early 2018, and in 2021 the school launched its first online program and its first associate degree, in culinary arts at Los Angeles (ICE, History).

Accreditation is national, through ACCSC, which is the usual standing of an American career school. The credential for most students is a diploma; the Los Angeles campus also offers associate degrees in culinary arts, pastry and baking arts, and plant based culinary arts (ICE, History).

In the field, ICE is the short intensive school in the biggest restaurant city in the United States, and one of four American schools with a measurable share of the country’s Michelin starred chefs, which I come to below.

The French Culinary Institute legacy

The other history belongs to a school that no longer exists. Dorothy Cann Hamilton founded the French Culinary Institute in New York in 1984, with Jacques Pépin, Alain Sailhac and André Soltner as founding deans and Jacques Torres later among its deans. As the curriculum grew beyond classic French technique it was renamed the International Culinary Center. It closed in 2020 during the pandemic, and in the same year “ICE entered into a licensing agreement with the NYC-based International Culinary Center,” carrying over several programs including the Intensive Sommelier Training. ICE describes the school as “the training ground for famed chefs such as Bobby Flay, David Chang, Dan Barber, Christina Tosi and Wylie Dufresne” (ICE, ICE honors the legacy of the French Culinary Institute).

A student should read that carefully. Flay, Chang, Barber and Tosi trained at the French Culinary Institute before ICE had any connection to it. ICE holds the legacy and some of the curriculum; it did not teach those chefs, and this page keeps the two records separate.

Programs and how they are taught

The career programs are Culinary Arts, Pastry & Baking Arts, Plant-Based Culinary Arts, Restaurant & Culinary Management, and hospitality and hotel management, with professional development courses and online programs. The school lists Culinary Arts at eight to twelve months, Pastry & Baking Arts at eight to eleven months, a health centered culinary arts program at eight to thirteen months, Restaurant & Culinary Management at eight to nine months, hospitality programs at eight or twelve months, the Culinary Arts & Management associate degree at fourteen to sixteen months, and an online culinary arts and food operations program at sixteen months. Classes run mornings, afternoons, evenings and weekends depending on program and campus, with students attending two to five days a week (ICE, Culinary school admissions FAQs).

The externship is the school’s distinctive piece. It is the final stage of the culinary, pastry, plant based and hospitality programs, “an off-site hands-on experience that functions as the transition from being a student into being a professional.” Career services advisers help a student prepare, taking account of skills, personality, work preferences and time, and the placement is found through what the school calls “a mutual selection process”: students visit kitchens, and employers offer positions only to candidates they believe will fit the team. Placements include Michelin starred restaurants, where an extern may own one prep task in a large kitchen, smaller restaurants where everyone does everything, hotels, and kitchens in a student’s home community. Students are graded by their chefs, must submit proof of hours worked to graduate, and the school says the process “helps to put students in a position to potentially be offered a job at the end of their externship” (ICE, What is an externship?). The page does not say whether externships are paid.

This is the closest an American school comes to the stage system the chefs in my books describe, with the school’s career office standing behind the student. There is no public restaurant run by students, as there is at the Culinary Institute of America; the externship kitchen is the restaurant.

Who it is for and how to get in

The school requires a high school diploma or an equivalent such as a GED, with documentation, and legal authorization to study in the United States, and it says it reviews each applicant’s motivation, goals and readiness for professional training. Online applicants complete an online readiness assessment. The sommelier programs require applicants to be 21 in New York and 18 in Los Angeles. No interview, entrance test, essay or prior experience is mentioned on the page (ICE, Culinary school admissions FAQs).

ICE suits a career changer or a young cook who wants to be working in a New York or Los Angeles kitchen within a year, who may study on an evening schedule while holding a job, and who wants a school that treats the externship as the point of the course. It suits less well a student who wants a bachelor’s degree or a campus.

What the graduates have done

ICE’s own history names Vivian Howard, Stephen Durfee, Claudia Fleming, Marc Murphy, Gail Simmons, Gina DePalma, Allison Vines Rushing, Trish Magwood and Greta Anthony among its alumni, and says several are James Beard Award winners (ICE, History). The French Culinary Institute’s alumni are listed above and belong to that school.

The independent evidence is a Chef’s Pencil study published on 16 March 2026 of 278 chefs leading Michelin starred restaurants in the United States, built from public biographies. It found that 61 percent had attended culinary school or a hospitality program with culinary training; the Culinary Institute of America accounted for 14 percent, Le Cordon Bleu for 8.3 percent, Johnson & Wales for 5.0 percent and the Institute of Culinary Education for 4.7 percent, with the ICE figure including the French Culinary Institute and International Culinary Center as legacy schools. The authors say they did not confirm the details with every chef and that “minor inaccuracies may occur” (Chef’s Pencil, 16 March 2026). Because the count folds the two schools together, a reader cannot tell how many of those chefs ICE itself trained.

What the chefs in my books say

None of the chefs I interviewed names ICE or the French Culinary Institute in his or her profile. The American chefs in the books who went to culinary school leave the school unnamed. What they do describe, repeatedly, is the externship in all but name: the stage.

Aaron Silverman of Rose’s Luxury in Washington found his calling in one.

“While cooking at home with my father when I was young helped build an interest in cooking, the key moment that led me on this journey was a month long stage at 2941 Restaurant in Falls Church, Virginia, while I was on winter break in college.” Aaron Silverman, in A Wealth of Insight (2019)

He finished college a year early to enroll in culinary school on the strength of that month. Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin told me about the training between his first and second years of culinary school, when his chef handed him about 25 ducks to debone, confit and freeze; the story he remembers from school is a story from a kitchen.

And Pedro Subijana of Akelarre, after more than fifty years at the stove, described the sequence that ICE’s structure happens to follow.

“Once you make an honest assessment and decision, you should enroll in culinary school, but not to learn everything. You need to learn how to learn. Only after school when you join the ranks of a kitchen, put your skills to work and learn from everyone around you will you begin to absorb true knowledge.” Pedro Subijana, in A Wealth of Insight (2019)

How to decide

Decide whether you want under a year in a class kitchen followed by a placement you have to win, or two years and a degree with a semester in a public restaurant. If the former, ICE is the serious option in New York, and the externship is the part of the course to prepare for from the first week, because the chefs who offer places choose the students they want. Ask the school where last year’s externs went and how many were kept on. And treat the French Culinary Institute names as history, with respect, rather than as a promise.

Then read Chapter 2 of The Luxury of Attention, on the apprenticeship, because the externship is where it begins. “No one in this book taught themselves. Every master in these pages is the product of another master.” The Luxury of Attention (2026), Chapter 2. The school’s job is to get you into a kitchen worth staying in. The rest of the education is yours to serve.

Sources

• Institute of Culinary Education, History
• Institute of Culinary Education, ICE honors the legacy of the French Culinary Institute
• Institute of Culinary Education, What is an externship?
• Institute of Culinary Education, Culinary school admissions and enrollment FAQs
• Chef’s Pencil, 61% of America’s Michelin starred chefs are culinary school alumni, 16 March 2026