Chicago Team Building: How the Drinks, Menus and Lead Times Work

August 12, 2026In-person & hybrid

The question that decides a Chicago team event is not which food. It is what people will be holding.

Rockoly’s Chicago page puts it plainly: drinks can be the whole event or a layer on top of the cooking. Those are different evenings with different budgets, and the choice comes early — the inquiry form asks what your team is interested in before a coordinator ever calls you back.

So here is how the glass actually works, what the nine-menu lineup contains, and the one tier that runs on a calendar of its own.

Two menus are the drink

Mixology & Mingle is a hands-on cocktail session — expert bartenders, every guest at a station, all equipment and ingredients provided. Sipping & Socializing is a sommelier-led tasting of bold reds and crisp whites with cheese plates.

Neither is a cooking workshop with drinks attached. If your team wants a happy hour rather than dinner, start at one of these two rather than adding alcohol to a cooking menu and hoping it adds up to the same thing. Mixology & Mingle is the one where people leave having made something.

Add drinks to a cooking workshop and it goes on the booking as a line item — and what is on offer is set by the menu rather than chosen freely.

Wine and beer belong to Cavatelli & Competition. The sushi menu offers something more particular: an optional sake etiquette session alongside Rolling & Bonding, which is a short lesson rather than a round of drinks. Charcuterie & Connection takes a wine tasting, which is the natural fit for a board.

Tell your planner what you want poured when you tell them the date, and it lands in the quote instead of surfacing later.

The distinction worth catching: included versus added

Tapas & Talk is where this gets easy to misread. Sangria is inside that menu already — guests eat grilled vegetables and marinated olives and sip sangria while they socialise. The Spanish wine pairing is the paid extra on top.

Same menu, two tiers of drink. Worth knowing before you budget for something the menu was going to serve anyway.

Nobody has to drink to be included

Appetizers and non-alcoholic refreshments come with every menu regardless — snacks alongside the cocktails, cheese plates alongside the wine, so nobody stands there empty-handed.

A no-alcohol version costs nothing extra when you flag it in advance, which puts it in the same bracket as the dietary requirements below rather than in the awkward category of a special request. Vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free and kosher work the same way: tell your planner ahead and they build it into the menu instead of improvising on the day.

Nine menus, not six

Round table spread with bread, prosciutto, olives, melon, lemons and herbs beside plates and gloves

Chicago carries more than the standard six. The core lineup runs two hours each:

Cavatelli & Competition is the most physical and the loudest — teams shape pasta by hand and compete on the pesto. Rolling & Bonding suits a group that enjoys precision: sushi rice, maki and plating. Charcuterie & Connection involves no heat and plenty of conversation, boards built from cured meats, cheeses, fruit, nuts, olives and jam. Tapas & Talk brings Melon con Jamón, Pan con Tomate, Patatas Bravas and Piquillo de Atún, with a show-stopping leg of jamón as the centrepiece. Then the two drinks menus above.

Above those sits a festive tier that only some cities carry, and Chicago is one of them — Festive Spanish Tapas and a Holiday Baking Championship where teams decorate three-layer cakes and prizes go to the most creative, best-tasting and most festive, plus short add-ons like Gingerbread Co-Workers.

Those festive items appear on the page in season rather than year-round, so if you are reading this in spring you will not see them listed — ask your planner instead. The in-person menu list is where they sit alongside everything else.

The third calendar

Most lead times here are simple: about three weeks for a cooking event, four for a happy hour. The festive tier is the exception, and it is the reason to read this in August rather than November.

Those menus run for a few weeks only, and Chicago books them out. That makes the practical planning number for a December date considerably more than four weeks — the page does not put a figure on it, which is itself the signal to ask early rather than to assume a month will do.

If you have a Q4 budget conversation coming, settle the date in it. Rush dates do sometimes work when a chef is free, so a tight timeline is worth a question rather than an assumption.

What a head costs

Every menu card prints the same pair: from $150 per person in your own office, from $250 per person at a venue Rockoly arranges. Rates move with the menu and the size of the group, so a planner quotes the whole event rather than reading you a sticker price.

The figure covers live instruction from the chef or mixologist, every ingredient, all supplies and equipment, setup and cleanup, extra food and drink so nobody leaves hungry, a dedicated coordinator with free customizations, and event insurance. Custom aprons with names or a company logo are $40 per person if you want people to take something home.

Customization beyond that costs nothing: combine two menus, swap a course, add a main and a dessert, or run cocktails alongside the cooking.

You are not running it

This is the part that surprises people who have organised an office party before. A Chicago event arrives staffed — a chef or mixologist leading the session, an event planner who has already built your menu, timeline and room setup before the day, helpers prepping and running stations, serving staff for the appetizers and any extra courses, and a cleanup crew that leaves your office the way they found it.

Skill level genuinely does not matter. Rockoly has run more than a thousand events, and the menus are built so a first-timer finishes something they are proud of inside two hours. The optional Pesto Relay Race splits the work into small jobs so nobody is stuck alone with the hard part.

Your office, or a venue nearby

Chefs arrive with the equipment and build stations on ordinary tables, so an office event needs no kitchen — your planner talks through the space beforehand. If the group will not fit, or you would rather make a night of it, Rockoly arranges a venue nearby and handles the booking.

Coverage runs from the Loop to Evanston and the surrounding area, so the team is not crossing the city after work to get there — which matters most for exactly the end-of-day happy hour this post opened with. Groups run from 3 people to 600 and up; very large teams are usually split by department or spread across a couple of days, and large-format events are a normal request rather than an exception. If your office has outdoor space, the Chicago in-office BBQ is the other direction entirely.

A Chicago note for the room

Worth deploying while people are working: the city’s most famous dish is younger than most assume. Deep-dish pizza was born here in 1943, at the restaurant now known as Pizzeria Uno — pizza built to be eaten sitting down with a knife and fork rather than grabbed by the slice on the way somewhere.

That is the same instinct behind these menus. The food takes a while, so people talk while they make it.

Deposit, reschedule and refunds

A deposit holds the date, payable by credit card, ACH transfer or check.

Refunds run on a day-based ladder rather than an hours-before cut-off. Thirty or more days out, you are refunded what you paid less any nonrecoverable costs already committed. Between 15 and 29 days you choose a 50% refund or a 100% Rockoly credit. Inside 15 days payments are nonrefundable, though one complimentary reschedule is yours if you ask 30 or more days ahead.

Treat that as a summary: the cancellation policy carries the windows and the event terms are the governing document. The in-person events hub repeats the same lead times and deposit terms if you want them beside the full catalogue. Every booking carries the Love Your Event Guarantee.

If some of the team is remote

These are in-person formats. For a genuinely distributed team, a virtual cooking class ships ingredients to each participant instead, and the virtual catalogue has the range — several of these menus appear in both. A wine tasting works either way.

When the date is close to settled, the form on the Chicago events page reaches a coordinator, and client-facing evenings are planned the same way as internal ones.

Other cities

Rockoly runs the same in-person formats in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC, the Bay Area, Southern California, Seattle, Austin and Columbus — the in-person events page has the full coverage list.