BY NOW, everybody knows about so-called celebrity chefs By now, ...

Meet Joe O'Donoghue, 38-year-old founder of A-list ice-sculpting business Ice Fantasies, and originator of the role of Ice Sculptor Superstar. Consistent with the image, the first things that hit you upon entering O'Donoghue's carefully minimalist DUMBO loft are a floral smell and the sight of a long-haired figure who sits, Elvis-like, with his back to the door. This is O'Donoghue.

In truth, one doesn't picture anything, except for maybe a rotund guy in culinary whites, when imagining what an ice sculptor might look like. But O'Donoghue is an especially attractive guy. Lean and tan, the 38-year-old has long, sun-tinted curls, a mustache and goatee, the surferish good looks of a Dan Cortese offset by the coarse bravado of an Andrew Dice Clay. He's so good-looking, in fact, that he has a portrait of himself by pal David LaChapelle to prove it.

When we sit down to talk, O'Donoghue bums a Marlboro Red off of his cousin/assistant, a fellow named Doug who continually supplies him with amenities throughout the interview. In thick Long Island-ese, O'Donoghue describes the beginnings of his illustrious ice-sculpting career, which recently brought him, of all things, an Emmy award for sculptures he'd built for NBC's introductory segments to the Salt Lake City Olympics.

"When I started my company, I put out a block of ice with lights on it and it started a traffic jam," he remembers. "It doesn't have to be good. It has to be ice." But his ice is good. O'Donoghue is an agile and imaginative sculptor, whose styles can jump from subtle and sophisticated figurative work to constructions of mammoth scale. His most formidable project to date was the transformation of Harlem's Cotton Club into an ice house for an Absolut Vodka party, using more than 150,000 pounds of ice.

Stints like these have made Ice Fantasies de rigeur for some of New York City's most over-exposed entertainers and personalities, and O'Donoghue includes names such as Donna Karan, Denise Rich, Martha Stewart, Annie Leibovitz and Cynthia Rowley among his clientele.

To ply his trade, O'Donoghue freezes his own ice in a studio located in the basement of his building, where special chambers produce crystal clear, 300-pound blocks of ice. He creates his ice sculptures almost exclusively with a chainsaw, whittling a block down, freehand, to the desired shape, with only minimal help from finer tools and a blowtorch for finishing. If you can't afford a sculpture of your own (his minimum order is $1200), O'Donoghue can be found sculpting in public at Tavern on the Green on holidays such as Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Christmas and New Year's.

"In New York you can wear Prada, and that's okay," says O'Donoghue. "When you have a party, you call Ice Fantasies."