In search of simple, out-of-the-office fun with co-workers or message-driven, food-infused interactive encounters, culinary team-building events can make for tasty diversions or sumptuous sessions.
With the increased visibility of celebrity chefs such as No Reservations’ Anthony Bourdainor Hell’s Kitchen’s Gordon Ramsay, plus the opportunities travel affords to sample a wider variety of cuisines, cooking and food are hot these days. And culinary team-building activities are surely an extension of the new pop culture star that is the kitchen. So venues have stepped up to the (dinner) plate and have taken a seat at the (dining room) table to provide attendees with a variety of interesting and tasty activities.
Although some may debate the long-term benefits of these cooking activities as team-building exercises, meeting planners and attendees definitely enjoy them. And there’s a side benefit for the venues that stage culinary team-building events: they get to showcase their back-of-the-house food preparation facilities and impress meeting managers and attendees.
Venues Roll Out the Red Napkin
That’s how Michele Polci, CPCE, CME, rolls. Since there are so many meeting venue options in Las Vegas, the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino goes all out to offer a fine culinary team-building experience.
“We’re very proud of our food and beverage and want to do something great for our clients while at the same time showcasing our chef, meals and kitchen,” said Polci, director of catering sales for the Rio. “It’s another way to get our message across.”
And it satisfies the desire of many to gain additional cooking skills and knowledge, all of which reinforces customers’ desires to come back.
Everyone has great space and great rooms, Polci says, and with more opening all the time in Las Vegas and beyond, venues need to differentiate themselves. Culinary team building can inform customers and open their eyes to a small-hotel approach in a big city, as in the Rio’s case.
Polci notes that the response to culinary team building at the Rio is nearly as enthusiastic as jaunts to nearby Red Rocks and other local attractions, and without the transportation expense, although she says that staging a culinary team-building event is still hard work. Because she’s competitive, Polci particularly enjoys culinary team-building activities, and she often emcees.
The Rio’s programs started about four years ago for local customers such as non-profits and social groups. From that, it’s evolved into programs in which participants wear chefs’ aprons and hats (they decorate their own hats—the best one wins a prize) to planning and designing various dishes and preparing them. Groups of 30 to 50 participate, divided into three or four teams.
One such activity is a salad competition. Attendees are given a choice of greens to use, an ingredient list and the rules, and there are bonus points for using certain, potentially hard to incorporate ingredients. A chef works with each team as it first draws a picture of what it wants the finished product to look like, then begins making it. Judging criteria include how much the finished salad resembles the plan, how it tastes and the use of bonus ingredients. The chefs do the judging, although they usually help their own teams cheat a little, Polci says. The entire activity takes up to 40 minutes.
The dessert competition works in a similar way, but in it about five attendees are lined up on both sides of a conveyor belt to build a dessert as it moves by (ensuring flashbacks of the classic I Love Lucy episode). Desserts include chocolate brownies and pound cakes, with extra ingredients such as whipped cream and sauces. There are about 40 different items to choose.
After the cooking competitions, attendees are treated to a more educational and technical cooking demonstration in the show kitchen as they observe the chefs cooking lunch for them.
Sherrie Huneke, CMP, director of sales at the Chaminade, a mission-style hotel and conference center in Santa Cruz, Calif., says 80 percent of the facility’s business comes from groups and, because of the Chaminade’s reputation, many groups come there for culinary team building. It’s fun and people love to eat—often the main thing people usually remember about meetings is the food, she says.
The Chaminade’s team-building options range from preparing an elaborate, five-course, gourmet meal, which is then served in the venue’s five-star Library restaurant, to a popular hour-long chili cook-off (teams have 45 minutes to complete the challenges and are judged based on the creativity and quality of their final products).
“Besides the obvious benefits of getting people to loosen up, it also helps them relate to each other on something other than a corporate level,” she said. “Each member of the team gets to share ideas about what goes in the pot and what doesn’t. For example, ‘How spicy should the chili be?’ ‘Crushed tomatoes or tomato sauce?’ We’ve even heard comments such as, ‘Mom used to make it this way.’”
Huneke says that compromise is the key to negotiating in business, and in culinary team building the results of negotiating tend to be tasty and a lot of fun.
She calls the program a tasteful approach to team building and says the main goal is to create an atmosphere of teamwork and camaraderie among the participants, to have fun and, most of all, to relate to fellow colleagues in a more appetizing way.
Huneke says culinary team building is less for associations—unless it’s a board meeting—because association meetings tend to be too large. These activities are best for up to 100 people, she says. They’re very hands-on with a lot of interaction with the chef, so they’re really intended to be intimate and for smaller groups such as sales or training meetings. Chaminade’s executive chef comes up with the menus, but meeting planners also provide feedback. One Japanese company was setting up a conference center and wanted to use culinary team building as a model. The activities are tailored to the individual group, so their tasks included making various Japanese dishes.
Huneke says the activities aren’t necessarily intended to be experiential learning; rather, they’re meant to bring people together to have a good time.
“However, attendees absolutely remember it,” Huneke said. “Some groups come back for these eight times a year. It won’t help you re-create your organization, but it’s a great way to get people together.”
Of course, the choice of foods sets the tones for meeting, according to Dana Weiss, director of public relations for The Fairmont Chicago and Aria Restaurant and Bar. She says hotel and restaurant staff is very careful about the food, and that meeting planners put a lot of thought into the food their attendees will eat.
With all levels of people in many team-building exercises, a leveling device is needed, Weiss says. That’s why a good example of a culinary team-building activity is rolling sushi, as fewer people are likely to have much experience with it.
For sushi activities, the attendees are broken into two or three groups of six each. Making pizza is another good example of a leveling event—it involves groups of six or seven participants working together to design pizzas.
The levels of involvement are determined by individual participants. Some want to go as far as to shop with the chef—selecting the ingredients with the chef at the local farmers market—cook the meal and then eat it.
“This is especially good for green meetings,” Weiss said, as participants get the full picture of the food eventually served.
There’s even a design-your-own-ice-cream activity that involves flavors most people have never considered. The concoction can get wild. For instance, how about a nice dish of guacamole ice cream, with some pico de gallo? Or some chocolate-covered potato chip ice cream?
There are also cooking demonstrations, done classroom style, for groups of up to 100. These can range in duration from 20 minutes to 90 minutes and include options such as Asian stir fry, or, as green meetings prefer, demonstrations using only organic or biodynamic foods. An accompanying wine tasting is always an option (yes, there’s organic wine, too).
“People do get something out of these,” Weiss said. “They’re a welcome break from conferences, and they offer an opportunity for attendees to get to know each other on a personal and social level.”
She says meeting planners should push for creativity when they consider culinary team building, and shouldn’t be afraid to ask for things that might push the envelope.
The Meal is the Message
But it’s not only venues that conduct culinary team-building exercises. Jim Connolly, founder of CEO Chef, says his company goes wherever its clients’ meetings take place, and his staff works with the venues’ personnel. But he notes that his staff members are trainers, not cooks, although they do receive some culinary training. Another thing that sets his company apart, he says, is the fact that the activities follow business models and the dishes prepared are generally more sophisticated, such as spanakopita, a delicate Greek dish that involves phyllo dough and other ingredients.
And he deals with large groups—sometimes as many as 300 participants—and often in conference rooms and not kitchens, significant differences from fun-in-the-kitchen group soirees most often billed as culinary team-building events. To manage the larger groups, attendees are broken up into smaller teams that work on their own unique dishes rather than having all attendees working on the same dish.
Connolly, a former chef and restaurateur, began offering culinary team building 13 years ago. And he quickly realized that many meetings are short on time, so he went where the meetings were and kept the training sessions fairly brief. About 95 percent of them are conducted at hotels, resorts and conference centers. The company was recently rebranded from its original “Team Cuisine” name to more accurately depict what it does.
The cooking part of the activities is secondary to the training aspect, he says. The focus is on training, and the trainers are selected for their leadership and team-building skills.
“We blend in seamlessly with the venues and most chefs like having us there, because their skills aren’t as team builders,” Connolly said.
The secret is that even though the trainers are schooled in cooking and everyone in the company loves food, it’s the training that matters. Foods are selected specifically for each group, and the cooking begins.
But it’s after preparation and during dinner when the real team building occurs. Now that the ice has been broken and a new set of behaviors has begun, people bond even further while dining together. This is the “magic time” when everyone starts sharing, Connolly says.
After dinner, to anchor the experience with each participant, they are challenged to discover the meaning of the exercise and apply it immediately. This is done by the CEO Chef coach, who facilitates a discussion around lessons learned from the experience and gets the group to relate this learning to their current working world.
The most memorable program? Connolly said it was one he did in Orlando, Fla., for Showtime. Originally, it was feared that there wouldn’t be enough time in the meeting schedule for the team-building exercise, but Connolly and his staff were able to compact what would normally be a two-and-a-half-hour hors d’oeuvres preparation session into just one hour. Participants were broken into regional groups representing different parts of the U.S. About 30 teams were judged by Connolly, who tasted the food as it was prepared.
“This was probably the craziest session we ever did, and I was stuffed from all the tasting I did!” Connolly said.
Groups of all types participate in CEO Chef programs, ranging from lawyers to engineers. Some organizations want the entire company to participate at once.
“We have a team-building matrix, but we customize every program to each client’s needs. That’s important to event planners,” he said, adding that a client’s No. 1 requirement is that the message and theme of the overall meeting be carried through in the team-building activity.
“When we started, no one was doing this,” he said. “For a while, no one had heard of it. Now, most people have done it, but we explain that most of those activities are really just cooking classes. Ours is a genuine team-building experience. If they just want the cooking experience we can provide only that, but our real function is as trainers.”
Gary Tufel is a freelance writer based in Twentynine Palms, Calif.
