Take a look at the link below and you'll see there has been quite a bit about the new Capital range that's coming out. A good number of people have taken the effort of either going to Eurostoves in MA or the Capital factory in CA to look at a live range. I have it on pretty good authority that conversion rate of those that have seen it is near or at 100%.

The Culinarian provides 23k BTU burners (1k more than BS) and an option of a dedicated wok burner on 48" and larger ranges. Not sure if they are offering it on the 36". I wanted 6 standard burners plus a 12" grill and a dedicated wok burner but I would have gone up to a 60" range for that and that would just consume too much kitchen space for us. I ended up ordering the 48" with 6 burners and a 12" grill. They came up with a really nice dedicated wok ring for the standard burner that convinced me that the dedicated wok burner wasn't worth the 4 std burners it'd replace. Also, I've taken to doing my really high power stirfry outdoors with this:
http://www.outdoorstirfry.com/images/Products/PF13L130.JPG

Good luck.

Here is a link that might be useful: Search results for culinarian...

For what it's worth, on a BS, having a "dedicated wok burner" is as simple as picking up the ring off the top and dropping the wok in the burner bowl. Takes less time than to type this. And you can go back to using it for whatever else about as quick.

I'm sorry but lifting the grate off is a cool way to convert a standard burner to wok use but it's not comparable to a dedicated wok burner. When I was looking for a range a couple of years ago I seriously looked at Capital because they were the only company that had a dedicated wok burner. The design of the ring on the dedicated wok burner is very much like restaurant wok burners (it just looks nicer) and will support a wok a lot better than BS or any standard wok ring. The burner was 30k BTU which is higher than any other residential burner I've seen. The issue was the fact that in the Precision range, all the burner were sealed which I just couldn't deal with.

Capital does have a dedicated wok rangetop insert which has an open burner tube which I thought was really cool but just couldn't work it into our kitchen. With the option for an open 30k dedicated wok burner on the Culinarian, I was very tempted. I just couldn't go up to the 60" to have that plus everything else we wanted. The new dedicated wok grate on the Culinarian sealed the deal for me.

Amcook, I came to the exact same conclusion as you did over two years ago too. The Capital was at the top of my list (#2 was Thermador) until I found Blue Star. Then my kitchen plans stalled. But I always knew that if and when my plans picked up again, there would be a Blue Star waiting for me. Fast forward to today and my plans are heating up again. I've come full circle and a Capital is back at the top of my list again. Only this time it's the Culinarian.

I'm far from Asian, so I couldn't imagine dedicating any of my range real estate to a single-use burner. Unless you're homebrewing on the stove or making jumbo gumbo, why would you do that?

Seems like amcook came to the same conclusion. Probably a sounder decsionmaking process than, e.g. buying a BMW 318 b/c they make the M5.

The flaw in the logic of a wok burner being "single" use is that a wok is *the* multi-use cooking vessel. It's used to stirfry, steam, boil, deepfry, etc. So I would have no problem giving up 4 burners for one dedicated wok burner provided there is sufficient gain in power. The 7k BTU boost is just not enough. If I could get a 50k-70k BTU wok burner then I'd do it in a minute. Unfortunately, that's unlikely in a residential range.

Some may feel this is unsound decision making but a good wok burner is of much more value to me than 3 extra standard burners if I've already got 6 (in the 48" or 60" option). But, since the gain is only 7k BTU I felt that a grill was more practical.

We LOVE our 5-year-old Blue Star 6-burner cooktop. It's seen a lot of trouble-free "miles" and it really excels at what a cooktop is designed to do.

However, IMHO, no cooktop can really do the job of a wok range. When we bought the Blue Star, we also installed a small commercial wok range (150,000 BTU burner) OUTSIDE under cover away from the house. It's safe out in the weather but obviously it's a pain-in-the-butt not to have it in the kitchen (however, it's far preferable to invalidating my fire insurance and then causing a house fire).

There's really no substitute for that amount of heat applied to a 14" steel wok. You won't get the same flavors using a high-power residential cooktop, although it's certainly better than what you can do with a "normal" residential range.

We're SO fortunate to have the wok range, we've probably done 400 meals on it and I still smile broadly every time I use it (and every time I taste the results).