The drop-in cooktop grate is a single piece. No inner ring. :( The sales guy (trying to sell the product) told me I could just remove the grate and set the wok in the bowl. I wasn't comfortable with that since that would provide no air gap for the heat to escape and probably cause the flames to flair out, which might be dangerous. After seeing the thing in person, I realized that by simply cutting off the 4 pointed "fingers" of the grate, there is a nice opening just right for a wok. Also, by cutting at a diagonal, I was able to provide 8 points of support for the wok. I think what I did basically reproduced the center ring grate on the range model. BTW, hack saw would work but I took a grinder with metal cutting wheel to it. Took less than 5 min to do the whole thing.

Wow, cooper--that's really a testimonial to that microhood. Amazing. That's really great. We started out getting a microhood (actually a convection microhood) but then the convection part was so pathetic I ended up returning it and having to fight for my money back...I decided we'd just have the microwave somewhere else and got a hood instead (it cost about the same, actually). Unfortunately, since we'd planned the microhood originally I had only 30" for the hood, and I can really see now why they recommend 6" over the width of the range for the hood. Oh well. I bought up (the 650) because I hated our range (we were keeping it at the time) and I was dreaming of the day we'd replace it with a decent one -- gosh, one of this girl's dreams has finally come true--backwards, sideways, and 4 years late, but hey...

I don't think that there is any coating issue at all. Rather, the parts look to be uncoated cast iron where the pans in contact with it have rubbed through the oxide surface of the iron. Our cast iron grates on our stove show a similar feature.

What a beautiful pan. I can see why your daughter is thrilled to have it. Off the top of my head, I thought I saw some reviews at Amazon that Cafe induction didn't work well with the Lodge griddle with grill underside. You might want to double check that though. I bought an antique griddle, the kind with two gate marks on the bottom. (Gate marks correspond to the slits where iron was poured into the mould back in the 19th century.) The gate marks are less than 1/4 inch high, so the griddle doesn't sit flat in direct contact with my Wolf cooktop. And yet it cooks fine. The electromagnetic field rises above the glass a bit & interacts with the griddle. Maybe your Cafe will work too. Hope so! How well does the griddle on a bridge work? Fine enough by me. There is a "cool" spot in between the elements. But it still gets hot enough to cook. Whatever is cooking in the middle doesn't brown as quickly as food on the ends do, but it's still thoroughly cooked. I just have to leave the middle foods on a bit longer, or shuffle them around with the end foods. So far, no one has complained because their third pancake isn't as golden brown as the first two.