Where Teams Actually Connect
The best team building doesn’t happen in a conference room with a slide deck. It happens when people are side by side, sleeves rolled up, figuring something out together. That’s the kind of experience I design at Gala’s Atelier: culinary team building events that bring your people together through hands-on cooking, creative challenges, and real collaboration, all built around delicious food.
Why Gala’s Atelier
I bring something most culinary event organizers simply don’t have: a startup and tech background. Before building Gala’s Atelier, I worked as a QA Lead and Scrum Master in international tech environments, navigating cross-functional teams and the kind of organizational dynamics that most chefs have never encountered.
That experience means I speak your language. I understand what your teams actually go through, and I design events that connect to it on a level beyond a fun cooking class. When I build a team building event for your company, I have a genuine sense of what resonates with an engineering team, a product group, or a leadership cohort — and I build the experience around that.
Combined with 14 years of plant-based cooking and a background spanning Poland, Canada, Switzerland, and France, the result is team building that feels as intentional as it is enjoyable.
How It Works
Every event is fully customizable to your group size, schedule, and objectives. Whether you’re planning an annual offsite, a department day, or a welcome event for new joiners, there’s a format that fits. You choose it. I handle everything else. All events are 100% plant-based, conducted in English.
Two flexible venue options for most events:
- At a venue: I secure an equipped space and you bring your people
- At your company premises: I come to you (subject to kitchen or space requirements per event).
Featured Events
A sample of what’s possible. Every event can be adapted in theme, duration, and group size.
The Mystery Crate
You get what you get. Now make it great.
Each team receives a mystery crate of seasonal Loire Valley vegetables and pantry staples, and must collectively design and cook two plant-based dishes within a set time.
The choice of what to make, how to divide the work, and how to plate it is entirely up to the team. A facilitator is present throughout the session and available to support with ideas or technique if needed, but teams are fully equipped to run with it on their own.
At the end, dishes are evaluated against a simple judging grid covering taste, presentation, and teamwork.
Agile vs. Waterfall
Same ingredients. Same time. Completely different experiences.
The Waterfall team locks in their full menu from the start. Roles are fixed, phases require sign-off before moving on, and — crucially — no recipe adjustments once cooking begins. Extra herbs on the counter? Not in the plan, not in the dish.
The Agile team doesn’t know their final dish until the last sprint. They cook in three cycles, taste and regroup after each one, rotate who leads, and build on every happy accident along the way. Halfway through, the facilitator drops a surprise constraint.
By the end, both teams have produced a full three-course meal. But one followed a plan. The other built one.
The Great Grazing Board
No kitchen. No heat. Maximum creativity.
This is the most accessible format in my series and the easiest to run on your company premises. Teams receive a curated box of ingredients (hummus, roasted nuts, dried fruits, olives, seasonal vegetables, crackers, breads, fresh herbs, and dips) and their mission is to design and build the most beautiful, balanced, and story-worthy grazing board possible.
No cooking. No flames. Just composition, creativity, flavor pairing, and teamwork. At the end, each team names their board and delivers a 2-minute presentation pitching their creation to the rest of the group. The boards are then brought together to form one shared feast.
These events are just a starting point. I offer a range of other themed formats depending on your team’s size and context. If you already know what kind of experience you’re looking for, or if you’d prefer to keep things simple with a classic hands-on cooking workshop, I can build around that too.