Finger Food Factory
The team puts together a finger food buffet.
What it is
Participants step into a professional chef’s shoes, guided by experienced culinary instructors, and prepare nibbles, tapas and finger food. Finger food means food you eat with your fingers, with no cutlery required.
At the end you assemble a buffet and taste everything that came out.
When it makes sense to choose it
It works well as the opening activity of an evening, because what gets prepared becomes the aperitif for the people who prepared it. There’s no threshold between the activity and the socialising.
It works well when space is tight too: it doesn’t need a full kitchen, it needs work surfaces. Finger food has become popular partly because it suits buffets and catering, and partly because these dishes look good and travel well.
It works less well if you want a dish to bring to a table and eat sitting down. Here you stand, you circulate and you taste.
What it looks like
A video says in thirty seconds what a page explains in a thousand words: how loud it gets, how much laughing there is, what the hands are doing.
How it actually works
But be warned: there’s an art to it. Even the smallest bite has to balance taste, texture and presentation, and every detail matters, from how the ingredients are put together to how the thing is finished. A dish reduced to one bite has to stay good, hold together in your hand without crumbling, and look clean, and the three requirements fight each other: what works in a full portion doesn’t hold up in miniature.
That’s why finger food turns out to be the more laborious kind of cooking. The teams notice on the second attempt, when the thing they had in mind falls apart as they lift it. The result, though, is always worth looking at.
You work in parallel on different preparations, then you assemble the buffet. Presentation counts as much as taste, because these are dishes people choose by looking at them. The day after, the team knows what it costs to produce in series without dropping the quality.
Three questions
Do you need to know how to cook?
No. The chefs explain every preparation before anything starts, and the movements required are simple. The difficulty lives in the format itself.
How long does it take?
It sits comfortably in an afternoon or an evening, and it’s one of the quickest formats in the cooking family to set up.
Does it combine with anything?
Yes, and with Cocktail Challenge in particular: nibbles and cocktails in the same evening, made by the same people.
When what surfaces deserves an afterwards
An activity surfaces a great deal about how a team communicates, decides and works together, and sometimes what surfaces deserves more time, more depth and a method. That is where a Team Coaching path can begin: a different road, to be taken only if it is needed, to turn what the day made visible into a new way of working together.
Discover Team Coaching →
Let’s talk about your next team building
You don’t need to have picked a format yet. Tell us what you want your team to take home, how many of you there are and where you’ll be, and we’ll do the rest: within 24 hours you get a considered proposal for your case, with the formats that hold up against your numbers, and what each one leaves the team the day after.
Prefer to talk? +971 50 795 9666 · info @ teambuildingincentive.ae