Last summer, when my old GE dual fuel died, I also wound up with a $2k budget and comparing a floor model Cafe DF with an NXR from Costco (and also comparing a Samsung induction range). The Cafe wound up dropping out of consideration when GE jumped the price of the Cafe stoves and the store got competing bidding going on the DF floor model that took the price well above my budget. I wound up choosing the NXR as you doubtless know from my postings in the NXR threads. Here are some of the points of comparison that I recall considering. YMMV on the importance of these things to you.

1. Costco on-line versus local store purchase. The attraction of buying from Costco (albeit on-line) was Costco's iron-clad, no-questions, money-back satisfaction guarantee. I could take it back whether the NXR line turned out to be junk (it is not) or my particular stove turned out to be a lemon (mine is not) or if I just did not like the stove after two or three months of using it (if, say, "myself cleaning" of the oven proved too much for me). The local appliance store gave me the first two options on the Cafe but the sale of the floor model was otherwise final. (This factor was hardly decisive for me, but it did favor the NXR).

I could have picked up the Cafe on the day of purchase but had to wait for Costco deliver my stove from a SoCal warehouse. Costco's website advises that delivery it can take 10 to 15 business days, although it was only took six days for delivery of the NXR to my somewhat out-of-the-way mid-country location.

One other thing about buying from Costco: with an "executive membership" card , you get a 2% rebate; with a Costco AmEx card, you get a 5% rebate.

2. Warranty. Both stoves have 1 year manufacturer warranties. Buying the NXR with a Costco AmEx card would double the warranty. GE has outsourced warranty service to A&E, the sears subsidiary with a poor reputation. NXR uses Adco, one of the most highly reputed servicers.

3. The NXR has a burner re-ignitor electronic module --- re-lights the stove if a flame blows out and continues to click if the burner does not ignite immediately on start up. The GE does not and, as with most gas stoves, it is possible to bump and turn the burner control knobs and have a slow gas leak. However, unlike many gas stoves, the Cafe has a swtich that allows you to lock-out function the gas controls to prevent inadvertant gas flow when you are not using the stove.

4. The GE runs all of the oven functions through a central electronic controller. Like all circuit boards, this can fail from oven heat including self-cleaning. (That is one of the things that went wrong with my old GE DF and led to my replacing it.) Replacement boards are not inexpensive. These facts may deter some folks from buying a Cafe (or any major brand stove, for that matter.)

5. The all-gas (AG) NXR is a mature, simple design. Any reasonably-handy homeowner can fix pretty much anything using standardized components (also used in other stoves) and available from local appliance parts warehouses. While many of the GE parts are likewise available locally, some repairs may be beyond handyman skills and tool kits.

6. Self cleaning vs non self-cleaning oven. This is one of those YMMV things. Not having a self-cleaning function is a showstopper for some folks. Other folks do not want it and will not use it for fear that the high heat eventually can damage the oven controller board. (Kitchenaid/Whirlpool also had a big problem with these issues for several years.)

I too roast a lot of chickens and such, and I've been a long time user of pyrolitic self-cleaning functions and it was one of the trade-offs for me in going with the NXR. That said, the NXR's porcellainized oven coating has been pretty easy to clean. Mostly, I spritz with Windex and wipe the interior clean using a blue ("non-scratch") Scotch-guard sponge. After Thanksgiving, I did have to resort to Fume-Free Easy off to clean the back oven wall and the convection fan cover. The NXR broiler pan is coated with the same stuff which has amazed me with how easy it is to clean. Roasting/barbecuing fatty pork can leave a lot of baked-on and cabonized oven spatter and drippings. Put the boriler pan and top in the sink, run warm warm water and a blue scrubbie takes it right off. The broiler pan on the Cafe looked to be the same unit that GE has been using for decades and which I mostly did not use because it was a such a pain to clean. I gather Wolf and several other "pro-style" stove manufacturers are using coatings similar to that used in the NXR oven, too, and I keep meaning to find out what it is and why it seems so easy to clean. Might just be a highly polished surface akin to what one finds in, say, porcelain-lined cast-iron pots and pans. So far, I'm not missing self-cleaning the way I was afraid I might.

BTW, my GE DF was not very good at cleaning the oven glass. I had to use a razor-scraper -- the kind you use for cleaning smoothtop-radiant-electric stove surfaces. I'm still doing that with the NXR, too.

One other thing, the NXR oven racks and supports are all removable, which eases oven cleaning and leaves less paces for gunk to build up. The GE oven supports are molded projections on the the sides of the oven and create places for gunk to build up (which is where self-cleaning comes in handy.)

7. Stove-top surface cleaning. I've found the NXR top far easier to clean than the top on my old GE dual fuel. It has deep wells (which helps keep spills from baking to the surface) and uses anodized brass burner components which don't seem to stain or require much cleaning. Hardly anything sticks to the top. I pull off the burner grates, spritz with windex and wipe with a microfiber cloth.

The Cafe seems to have deeper wells than my old DF, which does help mitigate some of the complaints folks have about cleaning stoves with sealed burners. From what I could see of the Cafe DF in the store, the burner components are cast aluminum with porcelainized caps much like what I had on the old GE DF. The cast aluminum will stain. The burner caps required frequent scrubbing with Barkeeper's Friend.

Note that the NXR has seams on the top but these are covered by the burner grates and, for me, have not trapped stuff or required any more cleaning than the sprtiz and mircofiber wipe.

One other thing on cleaning. The NXR stovetop has a bullnose that projects over the control knobs. Because of that, very little goo falls on the knobs and they rarely need cleaning. On my old GE DF, the knobs needed constant attention to keep them from looking grubby. IIRC, the Cafe knobs can go into the dishwasher, which may mitigate some of the work of cleaning.

8. Oven capacity: The Cafe definitely has more of it. The Cafe's oven looked to be very similar to the one in my old GE DF model except that the Cafe's baking element is "hidden" beneath the oven floor. In the DF, I could fit two half-sheet pans side by side on a shelf. The GE ovens have more rack positions and come with three shelves. Handy for baking lots of cookies and for staking lots of stuff during big dinners. The NXR specs indicated that the oven was deep enough for me to put two half-sheet pans on a rack, or even one with long-way in. However, the convection housing projects into the oven cavity just enough that half sheet pans must go in long-ays across the oven.

9. Baking Drawer: while this seems like an attractive feature of the Cafe, bear in mind that it runs on a 120v circuit rather than a 240v circuit as in the main oven. (The GE Profile line does have some stoves with twin 240v ovens, but the Cafe does not.) For me, the Cafe's baking drawer/oven is like a countertop oven in a less convenient-to-use location. Back when I bought my old GE/DF back at the turn of the century, I thought its warming drawer would be something I would use frequently. However, it turned out that I hardly ever bothered with it. YMMV.

10. If you've read my NXR posts, you know what I've posted about my NXR exterior getting hotter than my old GE DF when the oven is in use. Parts of the NXR get uncomfortably hot, though not hot enough to burn except for places where nobody should be sticking fingers --- the slot between the door and kickplate (which is in front of the bottom gas burner), the slot above the top of the oven door, and the interior of the exhaust slot in the vent stack at the back of the stove.

11. The need for extras.

The Cafe has a vent at stovetop level in the back and makes you pay extra if you want a bit of a backguard to keep things from rolling or spilling behind the stove. The part is readily available and, depending on where you buy it, will cost somewhere between $150 and $320. The GE has full width grates over the entire top.

It's just the reverse with the NXR. It has a built-in vent riser to keep stuff from falling behind the stove, but you pay extra for a center grate that gives the full width coverage. (Some NXR owners want this and some feel no need for it.) When I bought my NXR, Costco did not offer the center grate as an option, so I bought one from Dvorson's online. IIRC, it was $110 with shipping and arrived the day before the stove showed up from Costco.

12. Speaking of oven vents, I never learned whether or not the Cafe's having the oven vent at the back surface level might result in oven-exhaust blowing on the gas flames of rear burners. It may be that the vent is angled enough to avoid that problem, but it might be a problem with doing low-flame tasks. As I have not cooked on the Cafe (let alone done so with the convection oven running), I don't know the answer to this issue.

13. Burner design and layout. The NXR has four full range 15k btu-hr dual stacked burners. With all four burners the same, you can put any pot anywhere. With the burners the same size, it makes it easy to run a burner-spanning rectangular griddle and get relatively even heating. (I'm using my 10 x 20 Lodge cast-iron griddle a lot more now; a bigger unit, like the ChefKing, would be even handier.) The dual-stacked design makes it easy to work with both large and small pans. From the NXR threads you've read, you know that the high-heat applications (high-heat searing, rapidly boiling large amounts of water for pasta, canning kettles, etc.), the NXR's burners' size makes them better suited to larger diameter pans (at least ten ten-inches). For medium heat and simmering, I've found no size restrictions. No problem boiling water ina small pan for a single serving of oatmeal, for example. For very low heat applications, I had no trouble melting and holding chocolate without using a double boiler on either the smallest burner on the old GE DF or on the low settings of the NXR's dual stacked burners. It seems likely that the Cafe would be the same as my old GE DF since the smallest burners looked identical to me.

The Cafe has four burners of differing sizes with the central oblong fifth burner for the included griddle. If you have searched on the Cafe, you know that the reports have been variable. Some like the combo, some think it useless, and some hate it. Some folks apparently like to use the griddle burner for poaching fish (do you have a fish-poaching pan?) and some say it works very well for deglazing and making gravy in roasting pans. The right front 20k-btu-hr triple-ring burner seems like it would be similar to the NXR's burners in favoring larger pans for high heat applications and might be faster at boiling large amounts of water. I do not know how it works with small pans. From what I could see at the Cafe floor model I looked at, the left-front 17k btu-hr burner seemed to be of a size that might favor 8 to 10 inch diameter pans for high-heat applications. Those were just impressions, however, as I have not had the opportunity to cook with a Cafe.

14. Personally, I've found that the NXR's 15k btu-hr burners are fine for everything I have wanted to do. Except for boiling large quantities of water, I hardly ever run full throttle heat under a pan. As you will note from the discussions of Blue Star, Culinarian, and AR Performer ranges, some folks here do want higher output burners and want to run them at full throttle. Presumably, with a suitably large pan, the GE's 20k btu-hr burner could be a minute or two faster at boiling large amounts of water than the NXR.

15. Some folks prefer having all burners the same size, which will favor the NXR. Others like having different sizes, which tends to favor the GE. I did not have a preference on this.

16. Both the Cafe and NXR have convection fans. The Cafe DF oven, being electric, offers a third element convection much as my old GE DF did. On my old stove, I found third element convention to be very useful for baking multiple trays of cookies. On my old DF, I could run three trays of sugar cookies or pepparkakor (Swedish gingersnaps) or cream biscuits and have them all come out evenly without having to rotate trays, etc. The NXR has only two oven racks and I find that, even with convection, I have to rotate those things.

OTOH, the NXR does a noticeably better job at baking multiple loaves of bread and custardy things like quiches.

Pies, cakes and roasted meats all seem to be about the same with the NXR as they were with my former GE range.

17. The GE's electric oven controller gives numbers of functions not available on the NXR. You can calibrate the GE's oven settings yourself to match what you read with oven thermometers. (With the NXR, you figure that out and do the adjusting arithmetic in your head.) With the GE, you can run the convection fan with the upper heating element to get convection roasting and broiling. There are timed cooking, thermostat probe control, and Shabbat/Sabbath modes. None of this is available on the NXR. The lack of Shabbat/Sabbath mode may be a showstopper for some folks.

18. The NXR oven can run be as low as 140F which is great for dehydrating and sous vide type cooking if you do those kinds of thing and something of a stupid pet trick otherwise. Other folks may find it useful to have accruate oven temps at the 160F to 200F range. My GE oven could not be set below 170F and was not accurate below 200F. Also, I've found that the oven temperature swings less with the NXR than it did with the GE. The NXR seems to maintain a very even temperature, never going much more than 10F above or below as the burner cycles. On the GE, the swing was more like 30F as the burners cycled. The GE's third element did help to stabilize the swings, at least for the middle third of the oven. I've found that the NXR tends to stay very close to the set temp at the middle of the oven and that the swings are more noticeable towards the corners of the compartment

19. The NXR has twin halogen oven lights which give much better illumination than the single incandescent bulb in the GE. With both the NXR and GE, you can use the oven as a proofing box for bread by turning on the oven light(s) and putting a pan of hot water at the bottom of the oven. The oven lights will warm the oven to about 100F in the GE. The NXR runs about 10F warmer, but has a manual switch for the convection fan which can help with proofing, sometimes. (Some GE stoves, such as the induction slide-in, have similar abilities but I did not see anything like running the convection fan for proofing when I checked the manual for the Cafe DF.)

20. Appearance. The Cafe looks like a slide-in with a brushed-stainless front and top and black-painted sides. The NXR is your basic industrial-chic stainless-steel stove.

21. Dimensions. The Cafe is the standard 29 7/8" wide which will fit readily into existing cut-outs. The NXR is a true 30" wide. Many standard cutouts are 30 1/8", more or less. THe NXR will be okay to slide into one that is "more" but "less" can be a problem.

22. Regarding abqdeb's comment about hauling that big thing back to Costco, the NXR weights 300 pounds. If memory serves, the Cafe weighs around 250 pounds. I had no trouble moving the NXR around using an appliance dolly. The NXR sits on rubber-like foot pads that slide easily across the floors. Using an appliance dolly, it was no harder to move the NXR into my house than it was to remove the old GE. Actually, after removing the oven door and racks and the burner assemblies and grates, the NXR was not noticably heavier on the dolly nor harder to maneuver than the GE.

23. Oven doors: the Cafe has a standard oven door that lifts off the hinges. Putting back on requires only that you drop the door back on the hinges. The NXR has a heavier door with very heavy duty hinges. The hinges are mounted into the door so that, as seems to be increasingly popular with higher-end stoves, the hinges slide into slots in the face frame of the stove rather than being mounted on the frame to slide into slots on the door. This set-up is very strong --- as long as you've got the anti-tip device installed, you can stand on the open door -- but makes it much fussier to put the oven door back in place after you've removed it.

24. I did find the NXR a bit easier to level than the GE. Basically, the NXR has short legs and more space underneath which made it easier for me to get at the adjustments. WIth GE warming drawer (baking oven on the Cafe), it is harder to get at the feet and make adjustments. Fortunately, you rarely need to fiddle with leveling once you've got the stove installed.

25. One final thing. So far, the NXR's infra-red broiler seems to be noticably better are broiling steaks and fish quickly than the broiler in my old GE. As far as firing up the broiler to finish off something, there seem to be trade-offs. The NXR broiler does a better job than my GE at making crackling on a pork roast or ham a roast, but I have to be more careful with other things, such as browning the tops of biscuits. With the GE's electric oven, I could set the oven for convection roast or convection broil and the fan would help even out the browning. With the NXR, I have to watch more carefully to assure evenness and am still figuring out how near or far to position things from the broiler.

This post was edited by JWVideo on Sun, Jan 6, 13 at 17:47