[timgdelisle]

Would love to hear out a better solution.

We cook because we enjoy it. Its the last part of the interview and meant as a meet and greet of the team, not as an assessment of your cooking skills. Knowing that you enjoy the people you work with, in my opinion, is better than going in dark your first day on the job.

In terms of other processes, I've got through much more laborious interview processes. In the consulting world we'd prep for hours and then go through several rounds of case interviews and getting to know partners. One of our team members is a lawyer with similar experiences. As a software engineer I like to showcase my work. Having the ability to give back to the community and the liberty to pick the project that I contribute to sounded pretty good to me when the team pitched this approach.