7. Richard Pash, a Marketing Manage

7. Richard Pash, a Marketing Manager at Mars and another Venturi customer, says cookery feels natural compared to some team-building activities. Constructing a bridge across a stream when there is a perfectly good one 50 metres away may seem a little pointless, but cooking a three-course meal you intend to sit down and eat certainly isn’t. ‘Unlike many courses we’ve been on, it’s the opposite of contrived,’ says Mr Pash.
8. Venturi’s Table isn’t the only company offering corporate cookery courses. The Cookery School at Little Portland Street in London has an increasing number of corporate clients who, says Principal Rosalind Rathouse, comprise about a third of its business. These include Investec, BP and Iron Mountain.
9. Many of the better-known cookery schools offer packages aimed at businesses. Mosimann’s Academy allows teambuilders to be taught by the eponymous Anton, while the Lavender House in Norfolk and The Food and Wine Academy also cater for corporate cooks.
10. The Cookery School differentiates itself by working with psychologists who observe the team members as they cook before feeding back to the group. Organisations that want to see how teams work under different circumstances can ask for a stressful or confrontational kitchen. ‘It becomes a microcosm of the workplace,’ says Ms Rathouse.
11. Perhaps the most intriguing use of places like Venturi, however, is not as venues for team building but for client entertainment. Ms Venturi’s daughter Letizia Tufari, who worked at Pfizer before joining her mother’s business, says client hospitality is a growing income stream for Venturi. She says that for cash-rich, time-poor businesspeople, fine dining has become rather pedestrian. But cooking a three-course meal for oneself is more unusual.