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His victims are extra well-done.

"I'll show you 'mere cook' after I fillet each and every last one of you bastards!"
Sanji, One Piece

Do you really want to mess with someone who knows where the knives are?

A Lethal Chef is someone whose cooking is so terrible that it could fall under the Geneva Convention as an inhumane weapon. A Supreme Chef is a superb cook, particularly the kind that participate in televised Cooking Duels where "every battle, reputations are put on the line."

Combine the lethal potential with sublime cooking skills and you get the Chef of Iron: a fighting cook, someone who can kick your ass and prepare a gourmet meal with equal ease. They are a bad person to have as an enemy but a good person to have invite you over to dinner.

Chefs of Iron fall into different, frequently overlapping types, not limited to:

  1. "Ordinary" (or more ordinary than the following examples at least) people who are skilled in normal combat and mundane, if excellent cookery; one or the other tends to be his day job. If the day job is fighting (e.g. military, police work) being a cook may show the character has a sensitive side (sometimes a case of Real Men Wear Pink and/or Real Men Cook); if cooking is the day job, they may be leading a double life of hidden badass. Or, they might be a chef for an army or suchlike, where they do both at the same time. In this form, may overlap with the Almighty Janitor.
  2. A cook whose special skills include using cooking implements in combat. They may be an Improbable Weapon User; there are many ways you can hurt people with boiling liquids, big chef's knives, eating utensils and cutlery, heavy skillets, fire etc. An angry Apron Matron brandishing a Rolling Pin of Doom at you may cross over into this trope slightly, especially if it's their primary means of defending themselves. Compare I Know Madden Kombat.
  3. A chef for whom cooking is their means of fighting, and we're not talking about Cooking Duels. Baguette Beatdowns, entangling noodles, golems made of food, chemical weapons made from hot pepper sauce, the pantry's the limit. May be combined with kitchen implements as above. In this form, they are practicing Martial Arts and Crafts.

Such chefs' cooking style may involve Asian Cleaver Fever. May overlap with Evil Chef as a villainous version, and commonly overlaps with Real Men Cook. Compare Battle Butler.

Not to be confused with a certain culinary contest, in case you didn't bother checking out that pothole above.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • Akame ga Kill! has Akame herself: who does the cooking for Night Raid most of the time. She also is the most deadly of them overall.
  • Black Butler:
    • Sebastian can go kick some ass and be home in time to prepare a five-star meal.
    • Baldo, the actual chef of Phantomhive Manor, isn't much for cooking, but he can beat you down with a frying pan. He's actually an ex-soldier kept on for his combat experience. His food might suck, but his ability to blow shit up is what he was hired for.
  • Yuuhi from Ceres, Celestial Legend, an excellent cook who can also kick some serious ass with a pair of chopsticks.
  • Shell and Leon from Chūka Ichiban! (mistranslated as Cooking Master Boy). The former has a steel staff and the latter has seven knives including a large cleaver for cutting cows open. Following the context of the show, all these are simply fantastic cooking implements, but their owners are well able to put them to lethal use whenever they need to. Also in the series, they've faced opponents who are clearly superhuman as well as a ninja chef.
  • Cowboy Bebop: When the crew of the Bebop have food to cook, badass ex-cop bounty hunter Jet can be counted on to whip something up, even if he only has one or two ingredients to work with.
  • Crazy Food Truck: The protagonist, Gordon, drives a food truck through a post-apocalyptic desert, fighting off bandits and the military along the way. He has to be a badass to survive in the wastelands, plus he's ex-military.
  • In the Cyborg 009 series, Chang Changku/006 is a former Chinese chef turned cyborg — and he still cooks in his spare time. And he even uses his fire-breathing powers in the kitchen! In the 2001 series, he manages to re-open his restaurant and proves that his cooking skills haven't gone down at all.
  • Simon Brezhnev from Durarara!! is a Russian sushi chef and former member of the special forces. He demonstrates veritable Charles Atlas Superpowers, jumping down several stories and stopping an equally strong guy throwing a vending machine mid-throw! And still he's a pacifist and only fights to stop fights with minimal violence. It's implied that the boss of the Russian Sushi is just as badass, though he's more subdued about it.
  • Delicious in Dungeon has Senshi, who hunts dungeon monsters for food. He has to be since he lives in the dungeon full time.
  • The anime Fighting Foodons essentially turned Type 3 into Mons style food themed monsters.
  • Masaru Aoki from Hajime no Ippo, a ramen restaurant cook who also is training to become a professional boxer.
  • China from Hetalia: Axis Powers, and specially in the anime. He uses his beloved wok to cook delicious dishes and to kick ass.
  • In Hunter × Hunter, two of the test-givers in the Hunter Exam were "Gourmet Hunters", who specialized in tracking down rare foods and ingredients and were expert cooks, but were just as capable of kicking ass as any other Hunter; in particular, the Action Girl of the duo, the Tsundere Menchi, almost killed a guy with her bare hands when he pressed her Berserk Button by openly doubting her Chef of Iron credentials. Then, when she had to come up with an impromptu test, Menchi told the aspirants to get a very rare kind of egg inside a very dangerous canyon... and to set the example, she easily got it herself. Almost everyone else got almost killed by merely trying.
  • Tenii in Shin Koihime†Musou. She impresses the main cast with her cooking at a local tavern, and is called on to prove her skill by Sousou. Then she grabs a raging bull by the horns and throws it into the air.
  • Nyan-ta of Log Horizon is a high level Swashbuckler who is capable of kicking major ass when he needs to. He's also capable of whipping up meals that would make Gordon Ramsay proud. Bonus points for being one of (if not the) first Adventurer to discover how to make food with real taste in the new world.
  • Lyrical Nanoha:
  • In Mahoromatic Mahoro is this. One of the side characters, Chizuko, seems to be there mainly to identify the exact dish from the precise 5* restaurant, which Mahoro has just replicated to perfection.
  • Akito Tenkawa from Martian Successor Nadesico... Ace Pilot and restaurant-level chef.
  • Kouji Kabuto from Mazinger Z was a Chef of Iron in the original manga. He is shown on screen to be the one that cooks for his household breakfast. It is also implied that his cooking is pretty good no matter how ridiculous it is (his croquette is huge (Sayaka said it's a Mazinger-class croquette referring to its size) and can shoot Rust Tornado (Unleash wind when cut) and Rocket Punch (launch a part of it when its cut, directly to Shiro's mouth), and of course he kicks ass in battle.
  • Whenever Mobile Fighter G Gundam and Martian Successor Nadesico appear in the same Super Robot Wars game, Sai Saici and Akito Tenkawa can usually be found bonding in the Nadesico's kitchen over their mutual interest in giant robots and cooking.
  • Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
  • One Piece:
    • The biggest example in the series, and the one who provides the page quote, is Sanji, the archetypal "ordinary" Fighting Cook. He fights with his feet to save his cooking hands from damage and considers a Chef of Iron Type 2 or 3 to be a personal insult (due to almost dying of starvation as a child and feeding the poor despite being hated by his family for it in his backstory, he REALLY hates it when people waste food, or uses cooking instruments for things that aren't food).
    • There's also "Red Leg" Zeff, the pirate who taught Sanji everything he knew about food and fighting; previously, he was the Captain and Cook of his own ship (or head cook, rather; they were the Cook Pirates, after all).
    • Baratie, Zeff's restaurant at sea, is actually filled completely with Fighting Chefs, who are so fearsome that customers visit the restaurant just as much to watch them fight as eat their cooking. They're technically all Type 1 like Sanji, but their weapons look like food and cooking instruments (even if they're not the same ones they use to actually cook with) giving the appearance of Type 2 and 3. A flashback reveals that Zeff wrote "damned cooks are welcome" in the job posting; Patty and Carne, who had been fired from 300 other restaurants for their violent temper, were among the first to apply not long after.
    • Wanze is a Type 3 chef who uses Ramen Kenpo to fight. He ends up fighting Sanji, and handing him his head when the latter's kicks prove to be ineffective against the former's noodles. This is the one time that Sanji actually uses knives to fight, but he only does it to disassemble (and delicately plate) Wanze's noodle armor, and puts the knives away immediately afterwards.
    • Cracker, Streusen and others members of the Big Mom Pirates also fit the trope.
    • Kozuki Oden from Wano was a boisterous and formidable fighter being a Master Swordsmen but in a display of Hidden Depths he was a Type 1 Chef similar to Sanji, whose speciality was Oden hotpot. He even cooked for the Roger Pirates whilst traveling around the world with them.
    • In the anime Dracule Mihawk is shown to be a talented cook in addition to being the Worlds Strongest Swordsman.
  • Brock from Pokémon: The Series,who can kick your ass in a gym battle and still whip up a great dinner with the barest of ingredients.
  • Given the amount of Martial Arts and Crafts in Ranma ½, you had better believe that this shows up a few times:
    • Ukyō Kuonji, the third of Ranma's unwanted fiancees, is an Okonomiyaki chef who spent over a decade training in martial arts for revenge on Ranma. She's primarily defined as an Improbable Weapon User who fights with spatulas; smaller ones she flings as projectiles, and a massive one that she uses as a melee weapon. However, she also has techniques that weaponize okonomiyaki ingredients; using a cocktail of batter and rubber cement to glue foes in place, oversized noodles as binding rope, and a blend of tempura flakes and gunpowder as an explosive smokescreen. She's even been seen throwing bags of flour as smokescreens. In the anime, she even has an ultimate attack called the Batter Dragon, which animates okomiyaki batter into self-propelled dragon-shaped pseudopod that grabs a victim, wraps around them, and then explodes, transforming into a flash-cooked okonomiyaki with the stunned foe trapped in the center.
    • A filler episode of the anime introduces Crepe King Joe, a one-off rival of Ukyō's who wields an arsenal of throwing spatulas and crepes stuffed with various nasty surprises, such as explosives or small flamethrowers. His ultimiate attack is the Golden Crepe of Death, where he wraps a victim up in a super-tough crepe to immobilize them before the C4-whipped cream blend inside explodes, taking the victim out of the fight.
    • The manga likewise gives Ukyō a one-off rival in the form of the masked Martial Arts Takoyaki chef Hayato, who fights with an oversized takoyaki skewer and can flick takoyaki as fast as bullets and with such strength they can dent steel.
    • A variant of the idea is Martial Arts Takeout, a style practiced by takeout delivery girls that involves fighting to protect the takeout they are carrying, even going so far as to use the food itself as a weapon (such as noodles being used as a whip). In the manga, Shampoo is shown to know this style, whilst the anime instead gives it to a unique fiancee of Ranma's called Kaori Daikoko.
    • The same anime filler episode that features Crepe King Joe also has the Temple of the Golden Stomach, a shrine and training center for all practitioners of cooking-based martial arts.
  • Princess Connect! Re:Dive: Pecorine is a gifted chef with a passion for learning new recipes, and also a nigh-unstoppable warrior when the quest for new ingredients and recipes means running into monsters, as often seems to be the case. At one point she takes down a dragon with one Megaton Punch.
  • Bianchi from Reborn! (2004). Attacks enemies with her Poison Cooking.
  • Makoto/Sailor Jupiter of Sailor Moon: Being a soldier of justice, she's also a very good cook and respectable domestic figure (she has to be, given she lives alone and was orphaned) which balances out her tough bruiser personality.
  • The second season of Slayers has in one episode a chef who knows how to prepare Dragon Cuisine. Of course, the first step in cooking a dragon is collecting fresh ingredients.
  • Loid Forger aka Twilight from "SPY×FAMILY" is an extremely skilled spy who greatly excels in tactical and close quarters combat who is also great cook. He can cook dishes comparable to the ones normally found in restaurants.
  • After more than a decade (viewer time) of being little more than the munchkin in the kitchen, Tenchi Muyo!'s Sasami Masaki Jurai showed in the third OVA series that as well as cooking up a storm on a regular basis, she could not only out-think a highly-trained and heavily-armed Galaxy Police officer, but also hand her ass to her with little effort. Sasami would have been about nine years old at the time, and did not appear to use her divine connections or avatar powers at the time — just a quarterstaff that she kept tucked away in her hair. Seriously.
  • Most chefs in Toriko are this out of necessity due to how absurdly dangerous some of the ingredients they deal with are.
  • Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-:
    • Fay D. Flourite is a powerful magician, experienced fighter, and superb cook. All of these come in handy in the series.
    • Tsubasa's omake, Shiritsu Horitsuba Gakuen, has Yuui-sensei, the new home economics teacher, whose culinary skills are admired by all. In the fourth voice drama, he mentions that he has some archery skill.
  • Dita Liebely from Vandread. Her love interest, Hibiki, enjoys her cooking, and she fights alongside him as a Dread pilot.
    • Barnette Orangello, another pilot, is the most Hot-Blooded fighter on the team, aggressively bombarding the enemy and looking for any excuse to bust out some of her gun collection on the ground. This stands in contrast to her other hobby, which seems to be baking cakes in skimpy aprons.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V has Michio Mokota (Reed Pepper in the dub) who could be considered a Duel Monsters equivalent of the characters in Fighting Foodons; his deck uses odd monsters called Coockpals, Anthropomorphic Food which he combines via a Spell Card called "Regal Recipes" into stronger Royal Cookpals, the Solid Vision system interpreting the effect as cooking.

    Comic Books 
  • Blackhawk: Although originally intended as a comic relief character, later retcons made the Blackhawk's cook Chop Chop a skilled martial artist and fighter pilot equal to the rest of the team.
  • Deadpool: A girl from Deadpool's past calls this trope by name: "In the Heya kitchen, they call me... the Iron Chef!"
  • Samurai Chef: The titular Samurai Chef, who's occupation is to test whether meals are fit to survive battle conditions.
  • Sunfire and Big Hero 6: Wasabi No-Ginger is an expert chef, able to prepare many local and international dishes simply for the joy of cooking. He's also a deadly knife slinger and doesn't appreciate his cooking being interuppted by villain attacks.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): Diana's old friend and the chef at the Themysciran embassy in Washington DC is a Kythotaur who is fully capable of taking on opponents with supernatural powers given that he's much stronger than a normal human.

    Fan Works 
  • Advice and Trust: Shinji is a giant robot pilot and he also cooks for his teammates. As soon as the first chapter it is pointed out that he makes delicious meals. A few chapters later he was shattering a Robeast to pieces.
  • The Child of Love:
    • Shinji is giant robot pilot and a good cook. Actually, Misato is not allowed cooking in their apartment.
    • When Asuka tries to make breakfast, she shows she is actually a pretty good cook.
  • DC Nation: Team Chefs Green Shield (for Clan Arrow and the Outsiders) and Fauna (for Titans West). The former literally has enhanced strength and durability to the point where she was hit by a truck and the truck came out on the worse end. She also cooks as a way to exploring her love of chemestry. Fauna is the product of a hippie farming commune and prefers cooking to fighting. Not that she can't fight if she's protecting someone - especially in bear or tiger form.
  • A Crown of Stars: Even after being inactive for a long time, Shinji is still a good pilot. And after starting living together again so long Asuka confirms that he is still a very good cook.
  • Evangelion 303: Shinji is an Ace Pilot and an excellent cook.
  • HERZ: Shinji is a soldier and pilot and a great cook. In fact he is the one cooks in his household.
  • Last Child of Krypton: In this crossover Shinji is a skilled at making meals for Misato and Asuka, and is also, well, Superman.
  • The One I Love Is...:
    • Rei is a Humongous Mecha pilot and surprisingly an excellent cook. When Shinji gets worried because she always eats instant food he starts to teach her how to cook a few recipes. She learns quickly and she becomes an excellent cook. Asuka even remarks she cooks like a chef.
    • Shinji is not as good as her but he is still a very good cook... and the squad member with the larger number of kills.
  • Once More with Feeling: According to Asuka, Shinji knows how to cook well, and his piloting skills almost match hers.
  • In The Paths Diverge Natasja, being a Muggle as well as a pretty good cook, favors implements such as frying pans and marble rolling pins when faced with troublesome wizards. She actually takes down a not-yet-captured Bellatrix Lestrange with a baking sheet and throws a barbecue fork at Voldemort himself in the graveyard after the Third Task.
  • Scar Tissue:
    • Several times Asuka points out that Shinji gets scary when he fights and gets angry... and he is the best cook that she knows. He constantly is trying to make tasty meals for his flatmates.
    • Surprisingly, Asuka -the best pilot in the series- is also a great cook when she sets her mind to it.
  • Superwomen of Eva 2: Lone Heir of Krypton: Shinji is good making meals, pilots giant robots and he can fend for himself in a fight to help Asuka or someone else in danger.
  • What Lies Beyond the Walls: The mole chef Meklarn is a fantastic cook, but when he finds himself cornered in his kitchen by vermin, he doesn't hesitate to defend himself. With a frying pan and rolling pin. The vermin don't even scratch him.

    Films — Animation 
  • Po from Kung Fu Panda was raised by a noodle chef, prior to being chosen to be trained as a kick-ass warrior. As a result, he knows a little something about cooking, and while it's not played up, he's definitely good at it. Once he receives his kick-ass martial training, he's a classic type 1.
  • Puss in Boots: The Last Wish: Pie maker and crime boss Jack Horner has a band of chefs / henchmen he calls the Baker’s Dozen. While they are proficient in combat, they start dropping like flies in the Dark Forest.
  • If Colette is to be believed, most of the chefs in Gusteau's kitchen in Ratatouille are some form of this. The most amusing one is the sous-chef who was in prison and tells a different story of his crime every time someone asks, including "I killed a man. With this thumb."

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Army of the Dead: Scott Ward works as a cook in a burger joint when Bly Tanaka comes to recruit him for the heist based on his combat experience during the Las Vegas zombie outbreak. He wants to buy himself a food truck once the mission is over.
  • The chef in Dragon Inn (another Martial Arts movie) is equally deadly with his meat cleaver in the kitchen and on the battlefield.
  • Four guys in a Chinese kitchen in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story rather suddenly become examples of this trope.
  • The Champion of Justice in Fish Story is an excellent example. He leaves the scene to get an apple pie out of the oven, and returns to find a hijacking in progress. They shoot him, but it doesn't stop him at firstnote 
  • In the Stephen Chow film God of Cookery:
    • The world famous chef and title-holder is disgraced by an underling. He picks up a knife and is disarmed with a teaspoon by the underling who claims that the title-holder has not cooked for so long his grip has grown weak. The disgraced cook then embarks on a journey to become a Chef Of Iron once more.
    • Sister Turkey. In a fight she punches through an upturned table to hold a meat cleaver right in front of the face of the man behind it. By day she sells fast food.
  • Hanzo Hattori from Kill Bill, people! After retiring from his blacksmith duties, he became a sushi chef in Okinawa. And then he came out of retirement to forge The Bride's iconic katana.
  • Sammo Hung, another martial arts film star, has a movie called Kung Fu Chef. Guess what it's about.
  • The 1996 film The Long Kiss Goodnight has Geena Davis as an assassin who's lost her memory, living now as a suburban housewife. Her memories start to reemerge when she's in the kitchen. "Chefs do that," she says when she does a little flourish with her knife after chopping vegetables. A little later, when she kills some intruders with the same knife, she repeats the line. "Chefs do that."
  • Sing, The Lancer from Mercenaries from Hong Kong, is a retired soldier who became a chef in a noodle restaurant. But upon being called back to duty out of retirement, he proves to be one hell of a killing machine, capable of taking names and kicking ass.
  • The 1997 Jackie Chan movie Mr. Nice Guy stars Jackie as a TV chef. (In fact, in Spain the movie was titled Super Chef.) Since it's Jackie Chan, he obviously also kicks a lot of ass.
  • Beck (played by Dwayne Johnson) in The Rundown. His dream is opening his own restaurant.
  • Steven Seagal in his classic Under Siege... when terrorists hijack a navy battleship, they secure the entire, battle-hardened crew... but they forget the ship cook. Who is a former Navy SEAL. Played by Steven Seagal, of all people. Yeah, they're pretty much fucked.
    Jordan Tate: You're not a cook.
    Casey Ryback: Yeah, well... I also cook.
  • In Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, there is a scene where Seagal's character sends a message to his co-worker, another chef. And everyone expected serious kickassery... But it turned out he just wanted the other chef to call the Mission Control.

    Literature 
  • Faquarl from The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud. He's a high-level demon whose true form is something nasty with tentacles, but his preferred human disguise is a cleaver-wielding chef.
  • Polgara the Sorceress from David Eddings' The Belgariad. She can turn you into a turnip and then fix you the best dinner ever (but not necessarily in that order).
  • Robert A. Heinlein's Between Planets. Charlie is a Chinese immigrant to the planet Venus. Not only is he an excellent cook, he knows how to handle a butcher knife and dies fighting against an invasion of the planet.
  • The Dumii imperial kitchens in The Carpet People are entirely staffed by these, all of whom are ex-army sergeants who made sure they'd be able to retire to a nice job in the warm. Despite all having missing limbs/appendages/etc., they are skilled soldiers and form the squad "Mealy's Irregulars" during the climactic battle against the mouls.
  • Circleverse: Winding Circle's Dedicate Gorse is implied to be this trope, if he ever left his kitchen for anything.
  • Harry Kressing's novel The Cook features the mysterious Conrad, who is able to manipulate and control people through his cooking, while using his superlative knife skills in combat with rivals.
  • Vlad Taltos in the Dragaera series is a professional assassin and amateur cook (and gourmand). His father owned a restaurant, which he inherited and ran briefly before joining the equivalent of the Mafia.
  • Patricia C. Wrede's short story "Utensile Strength" is about the royal family of the Enchanted Forest attempting to find an owner for a literal Frying Pan of Doom. They decide to hold a "warriors' cooking contest" with the Pan as the grand prize, and attract contestants from across the kingdoms. During the event, a non-competing princess-disguised-as-scullery-maid is found to be the Pan's rightful wielder. The warriors insist on completing the cooking contest anyway.
  • Early on in By the Sword, part of the Heralds of Valdemar series, a castle wedding feast is ambushed by overwhelming numbers of enemies. The survivors retreat into the kitchens, where they fight a desperate battle with whatever comes to hand against the invaders. This includes carving knives and roasting spits as improvised weapons, plus things like throwing boiling soup on people.
  • In The Hero from Otherwhere by Jay Williams, a legendary swordsman is beaten by a cook wielding a ladle and a cauldron lid. The cook is the real legendary swordsman and the other an impostor.
  • Honor Harrington: Honor's father, Dr. Alfred Harrington, rarely gets much central focus, and for much of the series, his distinguishing characteristic was being one of the finest surgeons in the Star Kingdom of Manticore and a doting father. As the series continues, we also learn that he is a fantastic cook, and in "Beauty and the Beast", we eventually learn that he was a former Space Marine and an ass-kicker of the highest order. Overall, he's a master chef who can put you in the hospital before you knew what hit you, especially if you threaten his family, and then give you the finest of care once you get there.
  • In Kitchen Confidential, a chef's autobiography, it's mentioned that it's very important to keep the kitchen crew happy, as the last thing you want is two heavily-armed chefs duking it out with knives, pots and the occasional Frying Pan of Doom.
  • Escrima in the Phule's Company novels. Escrima takes his name from his fighting style of choice, and pulls double duty as the eponymous company's cook and hand-to-hand combat instructor. He is Hot-Blooded, comically foreign and willing and capable to messily dismantle would-be food critics.
  • Reincarnated into a Time-Loop Dungeon as a LVL100 Catgirl Chef!, within its first few chapters, sees a powerful hobgoblin bust into the burger shack, and get crushed by the staff. They may only have cooking-related classes, but they are all at maximum level in them. It takes them "half an hour of throwing things at him to make him die", but they otherwise shrug it off.
  • Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures has Urs (type I), a friendly, talkative guy who loves to eat and "aims to become the best cook in the city". Come to find out, he was at one point the best swordsman in Wolperting, and even though he hasn't touched a blade longer than a kitchen knife in years, when the time comes he proves he's still among his people's top three fighters.
  • Rock of The Stormlight Archive is the best cook Bridge Four has. He's also the best archer Bridge Four has, though he likes showing off his cooking skills far more than he does his combat skills. This comes from the fact that in his culture, the first son is supposed to be a cook, the second son a farmer and the third son a warrior, and it's implied that Rock used to be the third son.
  • In Robin McKinley's Sunshine, Sunshine, a baker, falls into the first category of Chef of Iron, using magic and (you guessed it) the power of sunshine to duke it out with various vampires threatening to kill her.
  • Temeraire: The Supreme Chef Gong Su faithfully follows Will Laurence across five continents and, in a pinch, reveals that he can use his Absurdly Sharp Blades just as handily against enemy soldiers as on the day's cut of meat. Justified with The Reveal that he's an agent of the Chinese Emperor, sent to look after Laurence.
  • Tortall Universe: The Trickster's Duet has Chenaol, who is a superb cook (at least once the protagonist (who grew up in the western-Europe-fantasy-counterpart-culture) gets used to the southern-Asia-fantasy-counterpart-culture's cuisine) is also one of the four leaders and the armorer of the rebel group and apparently is very effective with a meat cleaver in hand-to-hand combat.
  • Beacrox of Trash of the Count's Family is both a Supreme Chef and a Torture Technician.
  • Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga: From The Warrior's Apprentice, the anecdote of Vorloupulous and his 1000 chefs. He hired mercenaries as "cooks" and equipped them with butcher knives instead of swords and the like, to follow the word of a law limiting the size of his army. Naturally, his penalty for breaking the law was to be placed in stocks and die of starvation. Let it never be said that the emperor at the time didn't have a sense of humour.
  • A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking has Mona, a Type 3 Baker of Iron, who defends her city against a bandit invasion using her powers of control over bread to make golems from dough, vicious guerrilla gingerbread men, and a furious, acidic sourdough starter.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Michael Garibaldi, the Babylon 5 chief of security, is also a near gourmet-level chef (specializing in Italian food), which poses two problems for him: 1. Being security chief on a Space Station tens of light-years from the nearest proper farm, getting certain ingredients (like fresh eggs and butter) is nigh-impossible, and 2. Dr. Franklin doesn't approve of heavy foods. Most of his time is spent being suspicious and kicking ass, so the cooking dimension serves to make him more three-dimensional. Note that it's Garibaldi who complains the most about the rations on B5, leading to a Crowning Moment Of Funny.
  • The Brothers Sun: Charles "Chairleg" Sun is the best killer in the Jade Dragons, raised as the Triads' greatest weapon, but his true passion is baking. He would even like to become a baker full-time, but his traumatic past and Undying Loyalty to his criminal parents prevent him from living such a mundane life.
  • Charmed: Piper Halliwell. Chef-turned-club owner by day, powerful witch by night. Her cooking abilities make it easier for her to brew potions, which can be used to kill demons. In the end, after she retires from being a witch, Piper buys a restaurant.
  • Game of Thrones: When the wildlings attack Castle Black, the cooks defend their kitchen with enormous and expertly wielded meat cleavers.
  • The original Iron Chef has at least two of these as challengers. One a former Sumo turned chef after a knee injury forced him to quit and another who was a professional chef who also competed at the national level in karate as a sixth degree black belt. (It should be noted said karateka, Lin Kunbi, was also the first challenger to tie with an Iron Chef.)
    • The Chairman of Iron Chef America, played by Mark Dacascos, is a black belt (both in character and in Real Life), and isn't shy about showing moves off in Kitchen Stadium. While it's not explicitly said that he cooks himself, he's a gourmand, and given the trope's namesake, he ought to count.
  • Kamen Rider:
    • Oren Pierre Alfonzo from Kamen Rider Gaim. Former special forces soldier (implied to be the French Foreign Legion) turned pâtissier (pastry chef) and then Armoured Rider Bravo.
    • Souji Tendou of Kamen Rider Kabuto, a world-class chef with fighting skills to match and an ego that outweighs both of them combined.
  • Tanis from Letterkenny is the honorary leader of the nearby First Nations reserve, absolutely does not take shit from anyone, will stop at nothing to protect the interests of her people, is the premier Lad-ette of the series, and is so serious about her skill behind the grill that even Wayne and the rest of the Hicks do not dare get in her way when she takes command.
  • Leverage:
    • In "The Wedding Job", Eliot demonstrates that he's eerily schooled in the differences in proper knife-holding techniques for different tasks, causing Nathan to become visibly disturbed.
      Eliot: Hold a knife this way, dice an onion. Hold a knife this way, slice through eight Yakuza in four seconds...
    • That same episode has Eliot dispatching The Butcher of Kiev by shoving a pair of hors d'oeuvres in his eyes that he squirted lemon juice on.
      Nathan: Did you just kill a guy with an appetizer?
      Eliot: I dunno...maybe...
    • This is set up as early as episode 2 ("The Homecoming Job"), in which he assembles a pile of phonemes into a convincingly French name for the hors d'oeuvre he's holding.
    • The team is later hired by the chef, who originally taught Eliot how to cook. Eliot treats the man with fondness, as he taught him that he can create, as well as destroy.
  • Sam Tyler, the main character from Life on Mars (2006), is a 2006 modern police officer transported to 1973, where cops are more likely to punch you in the gut than read you your rights. The fact that Sam is an excellent cook is used as an example of his modern values, which surprise the 1970s populace, to whom the idea of a man who is not a professional chef being able to cook is pretty strange.
  • Sayid from Lost. He's best known for being a badass soldier turned torturer turned assassin. In the middle of all that, one of his flashbacks show him working as a chef in Paris.
  • Special Agent Dwayne "King" Pride from NCIS: New Orleans enjoys cooking for his team when they're not fighting bad guys.
  • Reaper contains a demon couple who, among other things, are shown to be excellent cooks. They're not big on the fighting side; but, being demons, they can seriously kick ass when they need to.
  • Captain Benjamin Sisko of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, exquisite chef who grew up working in his dad's restaurant. And one of the most badass beings in the alpha quadrant.
  • Super Sentai
    • Gosei Sentai Dairanger: Tenkasei Ryou is a gyoza cook and the most powerful warrior in the team. When he returned in Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger, he still retains both his amazing fighting and cooking skill and can fight the Zangyack even untransformed.
    • Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger: Cooking duties on the GokaiGalleon are shared between GokaiGreen Doc and GokaiSilver Gai. Each have kicked more than their fair share of ass during the show. Even the team's Lancer Joe was seen baking a cake once.
    • Samurai Sentai Shinkenger has ShinkenGold Genta, a sushi chef and fighter. The sushi chef theme extends to his Transformation Trinket, weapon, fighting style and robots. All this, and he makes a mean curry rice - though that said, his sushi is So Okay, It's Average. This extends to his American counterpart, Antonio the Gold Ranger of Power Rangers Samurai - the "sushi chef" shtick was replaced with a "fisherman" one, but he knows how to prepare what he catches so it still fits. The respective Pink Rangers of both Shinkenger and Samurai also aspire to be this, but their cooking leaves something to be desired.
    • KajikiYellow Spada of Uchu Sentai Kyuranger, a Supreme Chef with aspirations of becoming a universe-famous restaurateur prior to joining the team in the battle against the Jark Matter Shogunate.
  • One winner for a first-season episode of Sweet Genius was a pastry chef and part-time prize fighter.

    Manhua 

    Pinballs 
  • In The Champion Pub, Antonio Jaberini is an Italian chef who spends his evenings in barroom boxing matches.

    Puppet Shows 

    Roleplay 
  • In Darwin's Soldiers, Dean Nixon joins in the chase through Las Vegas in the second RP. He is the Pelvanida chef.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Changeling: The Lost: The Knights of the Knowledge of the Tongue are always on the search for new flavors, particularly those of Goblin Fruits and Hedge Beasts. Which means they need to be fit to walk into, and survive, the Hedge, find the ingredients, get the ingredients (which may have lethal defenses or even be actively trying to eat them first), and then make it home alive. Then they gotta successfully cook what they brought back.
  • Some Dungeons & Dragons examples:
    • Clan Anklebiter, a tribe of gnome barbarians. Favorite food: Orc. The tribe's manhood trial consists of finding the biggest, baddest monster they can, killing it, and then cooking it for the tribal elders. (Hint: passing the manhood trial isn't based on how well you kill the critter...)
    • There's a 1st level downloadable adventure for D&D 3rd edition where the final boss is a calzone golem.
  • In Fantasy Flight Games' Cthulhu Mythos board games, one recurring Player Character is Zoey Samaras the chef, a Religious Bruiser with a strong combat focus:
  • Rocket Age: Hank Avalon, the owner of the best eatery on Venus, Hank's American BBQ, will come at you with a cleaver if you start anything in his restaurant.
  • Warhammer Fantasy:
    • Ogre Butchers use a specialized Lore known as "Gut Magic". Skrag the Slaughterer is likely the best at this, having implanted his cooking utensils where his hands used to be and actively stuffing anything he murders in battle into his massive cooking cauldron, to be served in the victory feast later on. The ogres, hungry as they are, are more than happy to follow him in battle.
    • Halflings also qualify. As well as being excellent cooks they are known to be talented thieves and capable archers. In addition to serving as skirmishers on the battlefield they also employ the Halfling Hot Pot, an artillery piece consisting of a giant slingshot used to hurl pots of scalding hot soup at the enemy.
    • More specifically, there's the Fighting Cooks, a mercenary squadron of HobbitsHalflings who are highly-skilled as trackers, hunters, and ambushers - and quite capable of going head-to-head too. More importantly, they improve the morale of the entire army with their delicious cooking!

    Theatre 
  • Cyrano de Bergerac: Baker Ragueneau is a realistic example of this trope at Act IV: He is a supreme chef who is capable of cooking enough food for a regiment and then he cleverly disguises in a carriage (and to occult the smell!) to smuggle it through enemy lines for the French troops (he is the coachman and goes through various Spanish checkpoints). He is risking his life for his friends, the cadets.
  • Mason from Journey's End, chef to a British reigment and Deadpan Snarker who must also fight.

    Theme Parks 
  • For those theme parks that feature full-service dining, the chefs who work there have to be a specific type of culinary badass. In addition to all of the usual stresses of being a professional chef, these guys face crowds that would make chefs in restaurants in the outside world cringe in fear. They have to be on the ball, quick, and precise to a level that is rarely seen outside of such an environment. To give you an idea, consider that in an average restaurant, a dinner service that sees 1000 customers is considered an oddity, and was likely a near-disaster for the restaurant that could easily have run it out of food. Now consider that 1900 Park Fare, just one of the seven restaurants at Walt Disney World's Grand Floridian Resort, averages 1500 people per dinner service, and isn't considered unusually busy until it hits around 3000 customers in a single night.

    Video Games 
  • ANNIE: Last Hope has a giant zombie chef called "Crazy Chef", who can take far more attacks than regular zombies, besides having a Frying Pan of Doom that can send you flying with each hit and throwing meat cleavers at you repeatedly.
  • Arknights has a few:
    • Gummy, who can whip up an absolutely scrumptious breakfast as well as heave around a giant vault door as a shield, can heal her allies in battle just by cooking, and is highly implied to have been relegated to cannibalism in the past with her strikes being strong enough to cut bones in two (which is represented in her kit with her talent that can temporarily stun an enemy she hits).
    • Jaye, who is actually just an ordinary fishmonger who has somehow ended up at Rhodes Island as a combat operator. On the field he's capable of silencing enemies as well as healing himself and/or allies with every strike he lands, making him a low-cost high-return kind of operator who can potentially sustaing himself and others if there's anything for him to hit.
  • Iksel from Atelier Rorona is pretty laid-back when working at the Sunrise Cafe, but wields a mean frying pan in battle.
  • Battle Chef Brigade is an entire game surrounding the concept. Cooks can become Battle Chefs, chefs specialized in hunting and turning monsters into gourmet food. The Brigade is an entire part of an army dedicated to them and they get to join by participating in an annual Cooking Duel. Battle Chefs became a necessity in Victusia when these invasive species of monsters drove almost all known species of animals to extinction. Monsters are far more aggressive and dangerous than the animals they supplanted, so chefs need combat training if they intend to cook with meat or forage for vegetables.
  • Brawl Stars has two examples, with both being Sweet Bakers who use some kind of Edible Ammo:
    • Piper leans more towards Type 1, as a seemingly-ordinary village baker who happens to be an expert sniper. The grenades she uses as part of her Super are sugar bombs she bakes, but that's hard to discern in-game.
    • Pearl is a Type 3, who not only fires her cookies during combat, but actively bakes them while fighting, as she is a robot oven.
  • Breath of Fire II features the owners of the Wildcat Cafe. The one you fight comes as a surprisingly tough boss battle if you haven't figured out how to get Ryu's second-level dragon forms yet (though he's helped along by the cafe's policy of getting diners to take off all their armor and weapons before trying to cook them alive).
  • From Team FK Digital's Chaos Code, there's Bravo Pepperonicine.
  • Chrono Cross has Orcha, cursed to also become an Evil Chef sometimes.
  • ClayFighter 63⅓ has Kung Pow, a Chinese chef who attacks with woks, chopsticks, knives, and other cooking utensils. All his moves are named after Chinese dishes.
  • One of the Psychopaths in Dead Rising 2 is Antoine, an Evil Chef who decides to serve Chuck as his next masterpiece of cuisine.
  • Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice has Mr. Champloo. He's a Demonic Cooking Teacher Martial Artist! Boom!
  • Indie game The Dishwasher has The Chef. He serves as something of a Guardian Angel to the Dishwasher himself, appropriately enough. Oh, and he also messily wipes the floor with dozens of government-trained, heavily armed cyborgs and survives his Obi-Wan Moment of being chainsawed in half from the shoulder to the hip.
  • Don't Starve: Warly, the resident Supreme Chef, can hold his own in a battle just as well as the other characters, and in Don't Starve Together, is even able to apply buffs to attack and defense.
  • Dungeon of the Endless features Chef Nanor. While primarily a support character who leans a bit harder on the "Chef" than the "Iron", he's nonetheless a reasonably tanky combatant who uses his cooking skills and knives to stretch the heroes' food supplies, turn slain monsters into usable food, aid himself and his immediate companions in battle, and inflict ongoing damage to all monsters on the entire floor.
    Nanor: The first thing a chef learns is proper use of a blade. Alla cucinaaaaa!
  • Your goal in Dungeon Munchies is to become an undead one, specializing in cooking magical creatures at the behest of your similarly undead boss, Simmer.
  • Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard gives us the Master Chef, who goes into battle wearing futuristic armor that includes a big metal chef's hat, and a potholder on one hand.
  • In Fallout: New Vegas, in the Ultra Luxe Casino, there is a chef named Philippe who you can openly provoke into attacking you (or psycho-analyze his terrible childhood to make him leave). Out in the wastes, there is the flamethrower-wielding Cook Cook, who is a member of the Fiends. He is the designated chef of the gang, with a propensity for murder and rape. Killing his prized brahmin causes him to fly into a crazed fit.
    • The Courier can become this as well with high "Survival" skills, letting them cook Philippe's Brahmin Wellington and the Wasteland Omelet, which needs a Deathclaw egg to make, something that can be found in Sloan's Quarry Junction, the Deathclaw promontory, Dead Wind Cavern (all of which are Deathclaw broods) and on dead dathclaws.
  • Final Fantasy:
  • Won-Won, the first Boss of Final Fight 2 is supposedly a sushi chef.
  • Oscar from Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance is not only the Team Chef, but a pretty efficient Lance Knight.
  • While Milfeulle Sakuraba from Galaxy Angel is a very cheerful Supreme Chef, her day job is piloting a manned weapon of mass-destruction that sports a BFG. The sequel series puts player character Kazuya Shiranami in this role (he only has the BFG if he's merged his Brave Heart with Milfie's sister Rico's Cross Caliber).
  • One of Game & Watch's attacks in Super Smash Bros. has him pull out a frying pan and fling out food that harms opponents.
  • While all playable characters in Genshin Impact(except Raiden Ei who is implied to be a Lethal Chef and can't be used in the cooking minigame at all) can both cook and fight, Xiangling is the only one who works as a chef. Her fighting skills also come in handy as she likes scouring various places in the wild in search for exotic ingredients, running across monsters along the way.
  • Grim Dawn: In your travels you will find an unusual man going by Ulgrim, who seems strangely adept at surviving in the post-apocalyptic wilds and cooks what he finds. When you invite him back to Devil's Crossing, he'll provide some of the best soup you'll ever taste, but later events need more and more of his battle skills, and he steps up every time. As it turns out, he's the Emperor's personal warrior and assassin first, and a magnificent chef second; he competes with you at all times for the title of most dangerous human alive.
  • Jam Kuradoberi from Guilty Gear: master chef who dreams of opening a restaurant as well as fighting ki master.
  • In Hitman: Codename 47, you get attacked by one of the chefs wielding a meat cleaver.
  • Raiden Mei from Honkai Impact 3rd is known for being a Supreme Chef and often takes care of preparing delicious meals for her friends. She's also a skilled swordswoman as she was trained in this field since childhood. In "Bustling Holiday Symphony" event, she uses a kitchen knife (or rather "Heirloom Sword") as a weapon.
  • The first boss of Jackie Chan Stuntmaster is a huge, burly chef who puts up one hell of a fight. But as you fight him in his kitchen, you can find plenty of food to boost your health.
  • Henpecked Hou from Jade Empire. Although he's sworn off fighting due to his wife, he was once a master of the Drunken Master kung-fu style, and can teach it to the player.
  • The Chef Kyroo dream eater from Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] is a variant of the more knightly frogs who trades in the sword and shield for a frying pan and pot lid. Its repertoire boasts a vicious midair combo, various fire attacks, and even "hot potato" land mines. It also shows its cooking skills with its habit of occasionally cooking an ordinary treat into a rarer Royal Cake instead of eating it.
  • Kingdom of Loathing:
    • Saucerors and Pastamancers fit the Type 3 description to a T; Saucerors conjure various hot/cold/spicy sauce spells to hurt the monsters and can craft potions by cooking them; Pastamancers have spells such as "Entangling Noodles" and can summon pasta golems. Both classes also acquire skills that let them cook high-quality food items.
    • There are also enemies that fit the bill - Degrassi Knoll and the Gnollish War Chef, the Assistant Chefs in Cobb's Knob each have chefs, the Spookyraven Manor has zombie chefs and at the higher levels during the war between the hippies and the frat boys each side has the Baker Company (think herbal brownies) and the Grill Seargents respectively. (The later two, you might expect, kick considerably more ass, especially the Elite Mook versions.)
    • There's also the spring 2013 special challenge path "Avatar of Jarlsberg", which allows you to channel the spirit of Loathing's original chef-magus and access some of his very impressive prowess in both magic and cookery.
  • Kirby:
    • Kirby can eat a fighting cook enemy to gain the ability to cook his foes. Kirby can also use this ability in Super Smash Bros. Brawl as his Final Smash.
    • While Kirby fits the third type, the enemy that gives him that power, Chef Kawasaki, is a mix between the second and third types. He throws plates and can grab Kirby and cook him by extending his frying pan.
  • Link becomes this in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, owing to how important the cooking/crafting system is in the gameplay. As ever, he's the chosen hero who ventures out into the world with the aim of defeating Ganon, doing battle with many kinds of beasts and adversaries on the way there. However, this time around, in-game journals characterize him as being something of a gourmand, and, judging by the results of a particular sidequest where he sources and recreates cake recipes from the ruins of Hyrule Castle, he's a fantastic chef. Of course, throughout the game, you'll likely have him whip up a wide variety of meals and snacks with all sorts of ingredients, often bestowing a range of status buffs on top of the health they recover.
  • Legends of Runeterra features a card in the form of "War Chefs", a caravan of chefs in service of the Demacian military, with their full splash art showing them successfully fighting of a group of Noxian aggressors, including one of them knocking out an armored soldier with his bare fists. As the Flavor Text describes: "No one in the Demacian army should be trifled with."
  • Library of Ruina introduces us to Pierre, who is not just a chef running a bistro, but a cannibalist as well. She's an interesting example as she went down early in the game, but in Limbus Company, which is the game's sequel, Ryoshu gets an Identity as her in which she's way stronger, being capable of Anti-Regeneration, Life Drain and playing a Combat Medic role in battle.
    • The Distorted chef of Eunbong's in the latter game is also a tough fight if encountered, as he's a Mook Maker and a hard-hitting menace all in one. His attacks have a lot of coins and can roll high, with in addition being able to mess with your unit's stagger treshold to make them vulnerable to even more attacks. In addition, the mooks he spawns also gain substantial buffs every turn they're not hit.
  • Little King's Story: Downplayed. With most monsters, the "Chef" profession will be nigh useless, however, once you get to the Sunflower Plains (one of the largest areas in the game), chicken enemies start to appear, and these are among the game's Demonic Spiders even if you have a good army. Chefs can instakill these chickens and give you food in return.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda: Nakmor Drack, a krogan, becomes the Tempest's chef once he joins the team. He's an incredibly ancient krogan, having killed a lot of things in his time, and evidently a good cook. Anyone who touches meals before they're done has to make do with sandwiches.
  • Medal of Honor:
    • One level in Frontline takes place on a U-Boat, with the player fighting his way past the entire crew. The level route goes through the galley, where the U-Boat's cook will attack by throwing knives. He goes down easy, though. The same chef reappears in several different levels, including the final level, having somehow survived his previous encounters with you, but appearing more battered and bruised each time.
    • Weaker versions of the chef appear as an uncommon enemy in a few levels of Rising Sun. They attack in the same way, but don't hit as hard and take less damage to go down.
  • Miis from the Chef class in Miitopia can cook delicious meals to restore their allies' health... while beating the crap out of monsters with their Frying Pan of Doom.
  • Persona 4's protagonist can become a Type 1, depending on player choice. He will generally be doing the most damage in battle due to his Wild Card power and on nights when Nanako goes shopping he can prepare lunch for the next day. If the right cooking method is chosen, whoever he shares it with will greatly enjoy it, and gain Social Link points.
  • Peppino Spaghetti of Pizza Tower is a pizza chef who also happens to be a human wrecking ball capable of obliterating anything in his path upon reaching a high-enough speed.
  • PO'ed have you playing as a chef IN SPACE!! aboard a crew of Space Marines that crash-landed on an alien outpost. With everybody on board dead, you're alone fighting hordes and hordes of hostile aliens and robots, with your default weapon being your Frying Pan of Doom (which does wonders smashing the skulls of alien enemies).
  • Pokémon:
    • Siebold in Pokémon X and Y has a normal job as an executive chef, but he's also good enough at Pokémon battling to be a member of Kalos's Elite Four. He specializes in the Water-type, which is quite fitting for his line of work and makes him either a Type 1 or Type 2, depending on whether his Pokémon are his partners in the kitchen or not (the game never makes it clear).
    • Quite a number of things in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are themed after food, and corollarily several characters happen to be chefs who are also good at Pokémon battling:
      • Katy and Kofu are a baker and a seafood chef respectively, and both are also gym leaders, Katy specializing in Bug-type while Kofu Water-type.
      • Your rival-slash-partner Arven is a skilled cook, and during your last battle with him, he brings a team of Pokémon mostly themed after food: Scovillain (spicy pepper), Garganacl (salt), Cloyster (oyster), Toedscruel (edible mushroom) and Greedent (gluttonous squirrel who likes storing berries), with his old partner and best friend Mabosstiff being the odd one out. We later learn that he had to learn how to cook to take care of himself, as his parents are never home.
      • The DLC introduces Crispin, a Blueberry Academy Elite Four member who loves cooking and will roast you (figuratively) and your Pokémon (literally) if you're not prepared against him.
  • Power Stone has two battling chefs, Wangtang and Gourmand. The former is a type 1 while the latter is a type 3.
  • The CHEF (caps required, it's a bot) in Risk of Rain is an unusually literal example of the trope, what with being a robot whose directives allow it to absolutely massacre "customers" (actually angry aliens) with both a large set of boomerang-like cleavers, its friers and massive amounts of cooking oil, making it qualify for type 2.
  • Your player character in the Rune Factory games can become this, optionally. Put enough effort in, and you can create dishes that will wow even the local gourmand or Supreme Chef. Rune Factory 3 even allows you to craft utensils for use in battle.
  • The Jingu Clan have one of these in The Secret World. A giant of a man by the name of Akashi, he spends most of his time chopping vegetables and serving ramen to the hungry refugees gathering at the diner; however, he's easily one of the toughest fighters of the group - to the point that he often served as the diner's bouncer in quieter times. Plus, in the attack on Orochi Tower, he goes into battle alongside Gozen, the immortal leader of the Jingu; not only does he consistently keep up with her, but also with the gun-toting Mad Oracle of a Yakuza boss and the pyrokinetic demon mercenary captain tagging along for the ride.
  • Gordo from Skies of Arcadia: you first meet the man when he attacks your ship intending on looting its kitchen. He is one of the most feared pirates in the northern skies and owns a bistro you have to visit in the game. For the most part Gordo and his crew qualify as type 2, using kitchen knives as weapons and dressed up as chefs, one of Gordo's special attacks however ranks him up to type three.
  • Space Station 13: On most servers, the Chef of the station will have the super deadly Close Quarter Cooking martial arts while within the confines of his kitchen. This lets him single-handedly deal with any pesky intruders or even dangerous threats...if they dare enter.
  • Street Fighter IV has El Fuerte, a Masked Luchador cook who enters the tournament to find new recipe ideas. He can't cook anything unless it's Mexican food according to the letter of the recipe as he loves trying to mix anything.
  • The Suikoden series has several, but the most notable one is no doubt Hai Yo from Suikoden II. Quite possibly the finest chef in the world, and a master of the Cooking Duel, he is also available as a combat unit, with decent stats, and an interesting fighting-style. Wields kitchen-implements.
  • Elzam von Branstein of Super Robot Wars. Gourmet chef with a badass Super Robot and unstoppable theme song. There's a reason why he took the name Ratsel Feinschmeker in his Heel–Face Turn.
  • Tales Series:
    • Regal from Tales of Symphonia is a fighter who cooks well. Child Mage Genis from the same game is also a good chef, though he's less of a fighter, being the resident Black Mage instead.
    • Patty from Tales of Vesperia is a minor type 2 example, smacking or searing enemies with a frying pan for her Little Big Chef and Fire Big Chef artes (While simultaneously producing a helpful or harmful dish in the process), and making woks of prepared food fall from the sky or sometimes just a wok of boiling water that she flips at the enemy with her Welcome Dish arte.
    • Ludger from Tales of Xillia 2 is a type 1 example, easily being one of the strongest protagonists in the entire series thanks to his Super Mode and trio of weapons he can freely switch between on the fly, while preparing some seriously tasty looking dishes that everyone acknowledges as being delicious, even getting a proper chef costume from a sidequest. He can also take it into the type 2 territory if he's wielding his omelet cooking set along with the chef costume, which allows him to use the aforementioned Fire Big Chef arte.
  • Marshall Law from Tekken. He's even called "the fighting chef".
  • In the first level of Time Crisis: Project Titan, one of the sub-bosses Richard battles is a chef who throws meat cleavers as weapons. He's one hell of a good shot too, and can take multiple shots before he's finally taken down, compared to regular mercenaries who dies in one or two hits.
  • "Captain" Cookie, in World of Warcraft's revamped Deadmines dungeon.
  • Yakuza: Like a Dragon:
    • Any character on the "Chef" career path is this, by definition. Pulling knives, pans, pressure cookers and pepper mills out of Hammerspace and wreaking havoc on the enemy is their bread and butter.
    • Zhao is one of the leaders of the Yokohama Liumang and runs a high-end Chinese restaurant as a front for his operation. He also apparently occasionally works in the kitchens, and Nanba and Adachi praise his chili shrimp to the skies. Zhao is also by far the most technically proficient fighter in the game. He is clearly trained in Five Animal Style kung fu, and uses a precise, fluid fighting style with either his bare hands or a Chinese saber in his default job. He is also the character who benefits most from taking levels in "Chef".
  • The Chef ring set in Gaia Online's zOMG! is meant to simulate one of these. The original Chef set was Pot Lid (armor), Teflon Spray (armor), Knife Sharpen (attack buff), and Meat (HP increase), and the complete set's passive boost was to armor, making the Chef a Barrier Warrior best played with a second set or a few allies. In late 2009, ring sets were tweaked for balance: the Chef set switched Teflon for the powerful-but-pricy Hack (attacking) ring, Knife Sharpen's use was changed to an attack debuff, and the complete set's passive boost was changed to the dodge stat, making Chef more versatile in solo play.
  • The China stage of Zunzunkyou No Yabou ends with you fighting a chef boss, who spams dumping projectiles that can hurt you.

    Visual Novels 
  • Fate/stay night:
    • Emiya Shirou was the Supreme Chef before beginning to master his combat abilities, becoming a Type 1. By extension, this makes Archer one as well, though this is most obvious in Fate/Grand Order where he's basically part of the Chaldea kitchen staff when he's not out in the field kicking ass.
    • Tohsaka Rin qualifies, being a proficient magus/hand-to-hand combatant and cook of roughly equivalent skill.
    • Matou Sakura as well, but mostly in the Heaven's Feel path... when she snaps due to all the Break the Cutie piled up on her and shows how everyone should Beware the Nice Ones. In fact, Shirou himself taught her to cook, and he has apparently said she is now the best of the two.
  • Your Turn to Die has Kai Satou, a self-proclaimed homemaker whose best meal is eggs benedict. He first seems like a harmless eccentric, but wields both a frying pan and a kitchen knife, and isn't afraid to use them. He's ultimately revealed to be Sara's secret bodyguard and protector, originally trained to be an assassin in his youth.

    Web Animation 

    Webcomics 
  • Played with in Dubious Company, when Tiren decides to bake chocolate:
    Everyone: SHE can cook?
    Fumiko: Duh!
    [later]
    Fumiko: I thought you said she remade the chocolate?
    Sal: She must have. It's more hideous than before.
  • Girl Genius:
  • Homestuck:
    • One of the Alpha kids, Jane, is a descendent of the Betty Crocker fortune with a knack at baking and detective work. She also wields a giant fork/spoon as a weapon.
    • Dad Egbert is seen using homemade baked goods themselves as weapons. He also has ties to Betty Crocker.
    • Because of the associations with Betty Crocker, it is sometimes joked by fans that Her Imperious Condescension, or her previous incarnation Meenah Peixes, must be a mean pastry chef as well.
  • Belkar from The Order of the Stick is a minor example of Type 1. As well as being a skilled knife fighter, he also has 4 ranks in Profession (gourmet chef). He makes a vulture stew for the Monster in the Darkness, and when a bounty hunter threatens to feed Roy's heart to one of his associates, he suggests cooking it with garlic to bring out the flavor. "Hey, I'm trying here! I have exactly two skill sets, and you get mad when I use the other one!"
  • Ronin Galaxy: Giancarlo can hold his own in a gunfight and still manage to cook up a full-course meal for breakfast the next morning.
  • Sluggy Freelance did the parody story of "Muffin the Vampire Baker", complete with armaments such as a portable oven. Of course, Sam has some things to show them about more effective (and traditional) ways to deal with said vampires...
  • Type 3 is very important in Triangle and Robert, where several of the characters are "Cuisine Mages" who can cast awesomely powerful spells derived from cooking.

    Web Original 

    Western Animation 
  • "Stumpy" Stumpson from Amphibia: a mountain of a bullfrog capable of going straight from the kitchen to fighting monsters one-on-one. He also uses a variety of prosthetic hands that range from practical (a spatula) to practical but deadly (a cleaver and a tenderizing hammer) to just plain deadly (a spiked mace).
  • Blue Eye Samurai. Ringo is a disabled soba chef who wants to become the apprentice of the title character. The first time he has to fight, Mizu hands him a kitchen knife because it's what he's most familiar with (it's also a Call-Back to how Swordfather honed Mizu's skill in forging swords by having her start by forging kitchen knives).
  • Celebrity Deathmatch featured the four-armed Japanese chef Beni Trauma, one of the Super Freaks, who is a pastiche of the DNA of Emeril Lagasse and Jackie Chan.
  • Granny Stuffem from Codename: Kids Next Door uses her creations as a monster army, with varying abilities, all of which are capable of incapacitating you by making you eat them. While singing pastiches of GWAR songs.
  • The Lunch Lady Ghost, Danny Phantom's enemy.
  • In Futurama, Bender proves a literal example by being a chef of 30% iron. And various other metals like titanium, zinc, dolomite, etc. It varies by episode and the requirements of the gag being made.
  • Roadblock of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero: A gourmet chef who also happens to be a BFG-wielding Scary Black Man.
  • Applejack and Pinkie Pie of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, the former being a motherly sister and the latter being a professional baker. They're both more than capable in a fight, on one occasion fighting off an entire horde of changelings with their bare hoofs, a cannon that shoots party supplies, and the magic of Stock Footage.
  • The Breadmaster on The Tick (Evil Chef type). Do not mess with his dangerous and yet delicious army of gingerbread cookies. "Not baked goods, Professor; baked bads!"
  • Wild Kratts has Chef Gaston Gourmand, who is an evil type 2, bordering on 3 (he has several times threatened Chris or Martin Kratt - while they were in animal form [and at least once while in human form but miniaturized] - to turn them into ingredients for his 'endangered species cuisine'). It is mostly his prowess with kitchen utensils, but also his maksmanship with his dough shooter that make him dangerous.

    Real Life 
  • The late Chef Harold Hillard was awarded three bronze stars, a silver star, and earned himself three purple hearts during his service as a US Marine (in both the Korean and Vietnam wars). After he retired from active duty, he became a chef. He went on to train chefs at Kaiser University's Tallahassee, Florida campus. Specifically, he teaches meat cutting and knife skills (one of his students in the fine art of rendering meat from whole pieces to small bleeding chunks was, in fact, the same Robert Irvine who will be appearing in the next example). At the age of 80 years old, he was still capable of deboning an entire pig in less than 20 minutes.
  • Robert Irvine, MCFA (C.G.) of the Food Network's Dinner: Impossible. He's a Royal Navy veteran. On top of it all, he's buffed and cut enough to look like he could kick your ass with ease.
  • Gordon Ramsay is a reasonably successful amateur triathlete. While in town for the triathlon, he did a follow-up on one of the Kitchen Nightmares alumni and found the place still doing good business. He also famously has a black belt in Karate, mentioned usually in concert with the assertion that arguing with his extremely vocal opinions would be a very bad idea.
  • Doris "Dorie" Miller was in Pearl Harbor assigned as a Cook Third Class aboard USS West Virginia on Dec. 7, 1941. When the Japanese attack started, his battle station at an antiaircraft battery had already been destroyed, so he went on deck and manned a 50 caliber Browning anti-aircraft machine gun (which he hadn't been trained to use) for 15 minutes until he ran out of ammunition. He was awarded the Navy Cross, the third-highest decoration in the US Navy at that time, by Admiral Nimitz—the first African American to receive the decoration. He was also the ship's heavyweight boxing champion.
  • Submarine cooks in general. In most navies, the submarine service is considered an elite force and sailors qualifying for it undergo tougher training than those in the surface fleet. Since one of the perks of being in the submarine service is that the food is better than in other branches of the military, submarine cooks undergo special training in cooking as well, including culinary schools and internships at top restaurants.
  • Britain's Royal Army Catering Corps has always been highly sensitive to insinuations that its members are just cooks and waiters in uniform and not "real" soldiers. In various challenges and proficiency tests of expressly military skills, RACC soldiers have outperformed many line infantry regiments and even equalled paratroopers and Marines. Just to make the point that they can. The Catering Corps has seen more of its members admitted to the SAS than you might expect, and in the reconquest of the Falklands in 1982, paratroopers and marines landing on East Falkland were astonished and chastened to find the Catering Corps had got there first and had set up a field kitchen to serve the bridgehead. They are also reputed to be the Army's camouflage experts!
  • Vinnie Pearl Butler (1928-2012) owned and cooked for a truck stop diner in the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of Apopka, Florida. In 1977, on one of her few nights off, her restaurant was held up and robbed by a member of the local Outlaws biker gang. Not expecting any help from the then-notoriously corrupt Apopka police department, she took it upon herself to visit the headquarters of the Apopka chapter of said gang. A small, frail-looking woman, she went alone, and unarmed, and had a lengthy private conversation with the club's president. Neither Butler nor the president has ever revealed what was said, but it is known (and is a local Apopka legend) that not only was all of the stolen money returned to the cent, the Outlaws from that point on until the truck-stop's closing 1992 served as unofficial custodians, dishwashers, and nighttime security guards for the restaurant. It was never robbed again.
  • Thanks to the human survival instinct, any cook that knows how to handle kitchen appliances can become deadly. Kitchen knives are large and sharp, sturdy ladles can hit as hard as a mallet, pots and pans can be lethal if they're in use (especially if being used for frying), rolling pins are big, hard, and heavy, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many deadly tools in the average kitchen (never mind an industrial or foodservice one) that there's few worse choices of location for trying to rob.
    ''BEWARE! I AM A CHEF! This means I have a lot of knives, and am very skilled in their use. It means I don't blink at stress that would reduce a punk like you to tears. It means I am used to handling things that are as hot as lava. So taking down a flea like you won't even slow me down!" — Motivational poster seen hanging in the kitchen of Chuck's Wagon, a truck-stop diner owned and operated by Chef Chuck Hollingsworth in Mobile, Alabama.
  • On September 4, 1942, the USS Gregory was attacked and sunk near Guadalcanal. One of the few uninjured survivors was Mess Attendant 1st Class Charles Jackson French. French swam around the wreckage, loading 15 of his injured shipmates onto a raft, then tied one end of a rope to the raft and the other around his waist. Telling the men on the raft "Just tell me if I’m going the right way", French swam eight hours in shark-infested waters, towing those men to safety. Unfortunately, as a black man in a segregrated US military, "The Human Tugboat" was denied the Navy Cross he was nominated for. In 2022, he received a posthumous Navy and Marine Corps Medal. In January 2024, the US Secretary of the Navy announced that one of the new Arleigh Burke-class destroyers would be named the USS Charles J. French in his honor.

 
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The Chef - AvM Shorts Ep 32

Despite having experience with sword fighting, fighting dangerous foes larger than life, and saving the world of Minecraft once, the main cast could not take on the village chef and steal the Master Cookbook.

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