Go team, go!

Beverly Stephen reports.

What makes chefs tick

The Silver Palate's Silver

Mastering chocolate

An American in Paris

New York City—"Laaadies and gentlemen! Do you know what it's like to be an Iron Chef?" Lynn Crawford, executive chef at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York City and herself a former Iron Chef contender, asks a group of event planners and travel agents gathered at the hotel for an evening of cooking, competing, and communicating. Or, in corporate parlance, team building. "I'm going to put you through a circuit training. It's going to be a long night of grueling eating and drinking," she says, striking a gong to set the evening in motion.

Corporations, law firms, banks, and the like have long embraced the notion of sending employees and summer associates to group activities to fine tune their ability to work together. Recently, in the wake of celebrity chef mania, culinary team building has become more and more popular—right up there with white water rafting and golf. And the latest wrinkle is setting up competitive teams à la Iron Chef.

"We call ourselves culinary outward bound," says Suzen O'Rourke, founder of New York City–based Cooking by the Book. O'Rourke is a pioneer, having begun to test the waters for using cooking as a team building exercise some 14 years ago in her avocational cooking school. The demand has grown so fast that today she does about 200 events a year. And recently she has added a wine component with sales and marketing director Lila Gault conducting Wine Wizard education classes, in partnership with Wine Australia, for the larger groups.

"Philosophically I believe cooking should be collegial, but people kept on talking about Iron Chef. So about a year and a half ago we put together a competitive format called The Challenge," O'Rourke explains. Each team gets an identical market basket and with the help of a staff chef comes up with an entrée. The staff prepares the appetizer and dessert. In one competition, "Deutsche Bank, the winning team, came up with a fish en papillote while another team poached their fish and the third sautéed theirs with curry," O'Rourke says.

At the Four Seasons, four teams competed in four different arenas—making an omelet, concocting a signature drink, decorating a cake, and identifying a lineup of ingredients blindfolded. Everybody got the Jell-O, but the dried dates had a lot of people stumped, as did the star anise.

Boston-based Teambonding calls their competitive culinary event Teflon Chef. "Sales teams tend to like the competitive format," says company founder David Goldstein. "Other groups like working together better. They're about equally popular." Either way, anything culinary is tops among the many team building exercises offered by Goldstein, who has added several new formats recently: The Ice Cream Making Challenge, Ice Sculpting, and Chocolate Company Challenge.

"Verizon wanted to do team building in Hershey, Pennsylvania, so we created a program for participants to build a bridge with chocolate. Each team had to build half a bridge and make sure the two halves could connect without seeing what the other team was doing," he explained. So highly did the teams polish their communications skills that their half bridges formed a perfect whole.

"People love to eat," he says. "You don't hear moans and groans about these activities. People look forward to them."

"Cooking is the great equalizer," says chef Julia Shanks of Boston-based Sebastians, a retail, catering, and special events operation that recently added an interactive kitchen for team building. "It doesn't discriminate by age or sex or physical ability. And it does shake things up. The leaders in the office aren't necessarily the leaders in the kitchen. It's a great way to level the playing field."

Judging from the success of these programs, bankers and lawyers find it entertaining to posture as chefs, though you don't hear of chefs spending their scant free time vying to try cases.