This afternoon, we had an office team building event at My Cooking Party, a cooking space that allows for classes and team events for schools and workplaces. We were split into two teams and each team got paired up with a professional chef, who would help “guide” us in the direction we’d want. Each team got one protein, one starch, and one vegetable, and had to come up with the most creative way to use each. At the end, two secret judges would evaluate each team’s dishes and decide upon a winner.

To be frank, there really wasn’t much creativity by the actual team members involved, as the chefs clearly had ideas in mind for what to do. I get why they set it up this way: the vast majority of people who take these classes have little to no experience cooking (New York City is the land of delivery, after all, and here, speed and convenience are king), so it would not be good to have a cooking competition where blind people are leading other blind people on a team. My team had shrimp, Israeli couscous, and string beans. The other team had skirt steak, potatoes, and spinach.

Our chef pretty much said, let’s make a pesto for the shrimp! And let’s also do a roasted tomato and vegetable stock based couscous! And who were we to object? I suggested using the ground coconut for a Kerala string bean sauté; he was not on board with this, and lightly suggested ginger-soy string beans. This excited everyone on the team except me. That just screamed “boring and predictable” to me. The other team ended up making a marinated skirt steak, French fries with rosemary oil, and buttered spinach. And somehow, they won despite how predictable their menu was, that their skirt steak was mostly well done, and at best, medium well in the center. The judges said that the fries were “creative,” but when did French fries become unique?

It was all fun in the end, and it was nice to be able to get out of the office and do something that wasn’t work related. But I didn’t really like that they made it sound like we had free reign to do whatever we wanted with the food and to be rated on our “creativity” when it was clear that we were at the whims of our assigned chefs and not our own minds. In that case, I would have preferred to just have assigned dishes with recipes per team and to eat everything together in the end. It’s either a real competition or not. It’s either with recipes or it isn’t. You shouldn’t have it somewhere in between.