Mid-Year Buffet Lunch: The IM Team Eats, Laughs, Repeats

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about a good team lunch: the food is barely the point.

Last week, the whole IM team piled into The Buffet on Level 2 of M Hotel Singapore City Centre for our mid-year lunch — and within about ten minutes, the office version of everyone had quietly slipped away. The person who’s all business in meetings was suddenly mid-story, hands flying. The colleague from another department you barely have any interaction with was laughing two seats down. Someone was already plotting their second trip to the buffet line before the first plate was finished. The laptops were shut. Nobody was checking Google Chat. It was, simply, a table full of people enjoying each other.

And that’s the whole reason we do this.

The Best Conversations Had Nothing to Do With Work

If you’d leaned in to eavesdrop, you’d have heard almost nothing about deadlines. Instead it was weekend plans, travel bucket lists, and a lot of “okay but where did you get THAT?” as someone wandered back with a plate of something nobody else had spotted yet.

That’s the magic of getting everyone out of the office. In the day-to-day, we’re heads-down — moving fast, hitting deadlines, and quietly racking up 200+ Google 5-star reviews and counting. We know each other, but we don’t always know each other.

A long table with no agenda fixes that in a way no team-building exercise ever could. People who’d only ever messaged were suddenly proper friends by dessert. Different teams who rarely cross paths were swapping stories like they’d been sitting together for years.

None of that shows up in a project tracker. But it’s exactly the stuff that holds a team together.

A Spread That Kept Us at the Table

It helped, of course, that the food gave everyone every excuse to linger. The Nyonya theme meant mee siam ladled fresh from the live station, comforting plates of rendang, a proper nasi lemak corner — and a dessert table that genuinely made people gasp a little.

The rainbow kueh lapis and coconut-dusted ondeh ondeh were almost too pretty to eat. Almost.

But the real highlights weren’t any single dish. It was the slow, happy lull near the end when nobody wanted to get up. And the way a buffet — with its endless reasons to get up, wander, and come back — quietly turns a room of colleagues into a room of friends.

Halfway Through, and Glad We Paused

We’re halfway through the year now. We’ve navigated the curveballs and grown more than we probably give ourselves credit for — usually without stopping to notice. A long lunch turned out to be the perfect place to finally notice.

We take our work seriously at IM. But we’ve learned the best way to keep doing that is to make room for afternoons like this one — to remember that behind every project is a group of people who genuinely like showing up for each other.

We came hungry, ate far too much, and walked back to the office a little fuller and a lot more connected.

Here’s to the first half of the year, to everyone who made it, and to whatever the second half throws at us!