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For many years the firm has sponsored lunch on Friday for all the firm’s employees. The lunch is brought in and served in the large conference room in the Philadelphia office and everyone eats together.

The Problem: Over the years the lunch fare had grown predictable and the lunches boring.

The Solution: Exploiting the enormous competitive instincts of those in the office, we set up a ten week competition to produce the “Ultimate Friday Lunch.” The firm agreed to provide to each team of contestants the same budget that the firm was spending for Friday lunches. Each team then was responsible for producing lunch for approximately 100 people within that budget. The quality of the lunch, as well as the creativity of the theme and the quality of the presentation were judged and the votes were calculated and compared to the voting on all the other lunches in the ten week period.

   Read the contest rules in full

What began as an entertaining experiment to see if the quality of lunches could be improved quickly turned into an extravaganza. Over the ten weeks, every kind of food was presented from Pennsylvania Dutch to Southern Italian to Sushi to Texas Barbeque.



As the contest developed the thematic presentations became more elaborate. Thus, on one Friday a Chinese gong was tolled throughout the office to mark the beginning of lunch. On another, a Neapolitan accordion player strolled throughout the halls providing atmosphere.



While the competition for the best lunch was close, the worst lunch was easy to determine. Tad LeVan and Shanon Levin served a meal perfectly suited for children under five – including hot dogs, mac and cheese and juice boxes.

 

The winners were selected at the firm’s holiday party in December of 2003 and awarded the firm’s symbol of honor: an orange ampersand mounted on a marble base.

When the ten weeks were over, many missed the competition. And so, in the summer of 2004, a new competition was created, the so-called “Battle of the Pans”, in which each week two teams would produce or procure dessert to be served following the Friday lunch.

The competition over dessert proved cutthroat, complete with killer desserts, trash-talking, bribery and libelous poetry all culminating in the suggestion that two contestants would end the competition as shown below:



There are no plans to host a road kill cookoff.