My home is under construction so I am not yet using my appliance choices. I am going with Blue Star. I have never used Capital so I can not comment on that. I have had the Wolf cook top and wall ovens, viking range and thermador range in past homes. Of those I would say that Wolf AND Viking were equal. However, Wolf is having issues with the interior ovens cracking, I am sure you have read all that. Viking is just making a comeback so who knows. I did have to open the Wolf oven to turn my food for even cooking. The Wolf cook top is not that powerful. I think with Wolf in particular you are paying for the name. It lacks power. It is pretty, and you will get the best service. So if that is the most important thing for you then Wolf is your best bet. Thermador was a very big disappointment for me. The oven cooked unevenly and the griddle took a life time to get hot and never actually did get hot enough to enjoy cooking on it. The Viking was a work horse and eventually had issue with the screws on t the door. Not a big deal. I know they had issues with this but it really was not a big deal. After I had mine the company sort of went down hill and got a bad name. I am going with Blue Star Platinum range top and the new electric wall ovens. I want the the open burner. (personal preference) For me, I also want the 25K BTU burner for wok cooking. It does offer a true simmer. I will be able to throw the griddle on where I want and getting hot enough is not going to be an issue with the high power burners. I am not a trained chef but I love to cook and do A LOT of it. I have not heard any feed back on users of the new BS electric wall ovens but I like that it has a pizza stone in the bottom. I am hopeful that this feature will prove to be wonderfully useful with pizza and rustic breads. It fits a full sheet pan and has 5,000 watt Infrared broiler. My top priority was a wall oven with French Doors. I think I found an oven that had even more than I was hoping for. All in all, just consider what is your number one most important thing to have and go from there. Then just consider how you cook and what you really need or want. You will find comments positive and negative on everything. Wolf will give the best service, or so everyone says. If that is the most important thing for you then just prioritize the other things on your list and see what you are left with. Coming to my decisions were gut wrenching for me. I changed my mind what seemed like a 100 times. I finally figured out what was important to ME besides the french doors. Once you really consider how you work in the kitchen one should start to rise to the top. Trust your instincts.

wekick is pretty proficient in the griddle department but the griddles are technically very different. Thermador uses a titanium coated griddle heated by an electric element. There are a few pluses to this arrangement. First it should be very even because of the electric element and have more precise temperature controls. Because the griddle itself is non stick coated it'll be easier to maintain as well. The negatives are that electric will be significantly slower to preheat or change temperatures since its a lower powered griddle. Recovery times (time to get back to temperature after placing food on griddle) should be ok since the griddle is a thin pretty conductive material. Monogram uses a Rolled Stainless Steel plate (I cant remember the thickness) with a gas fired infrared burner. The plus here is going to be heat up time and good recovery times (partially because of the plate thickness, and partially the gas burner). The drawback will primarily be cleaning since its not a coated griddle. The other plus to the monogram griddle is that you can level it independently of the range. So if you need to pitch it back to front to help cleanup or grease roll off, you can do that. Im not aware of any others that offer this. If you ask me though, I always recommend to get an all burner range and invest in a good quality removable griddle plate. The results will be close enough, the cleanup will be much easier, and when you aren't using it (which will be more than you likely will use it) you will still have those extra burners.

Thank you, that's exactly the type of feedback I was looking for. The v2 model and Culinarian look in pictures as if the lip blocks the grates, making me worry that centering anything larger than 12" would be impossible. I'm glad to hear for at least one of my options that there is no blockage. I'd hate to have to void my warranty by shaving it down a little to make it more usable in such an obvious way!

You absolutely want the griddle in the center -- especially if you "only" have a 36" range. It's the same reason why for our four burner 30" Bluestar, there is a 5" filler piece between the left and right burners. If you have big pots, things will otherwise just not fit at all. You need a little space in between, or you need to restrict yourself to small pots. This is particularly apparent, whenever you cook in a wok. Incidentally, this is one of the killer features of the open Bluestar burners. Part of the grates is removable and turns any burner into a wok burner. We love cooking with our wok. Unlike with capped burners, the star shaped burners put the heat into the center, so the wok works the way it's intended to do. You can push food up the sides of the wok, whenever you want to gradually decrease heat; and you can continue stir frying at high heat in the center. Also, the high sides of the wok minimize grease splatter in the rest of the kitchen. We use our wok both for Asian and for a lot of Western cooking. It fits perfectly on our 30" range, but if you had six burners in a 36" range, the front center burner would be partially blocked by the wok. Of course, if you put your griddle into the center, this is not a problem.