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"A great chef is an artist that I truly respect."

This cook can whip up confections that make taste buds weep with joy, and make characters want to stuff themselves because the food is that good. Be warned, though, this character takes insults to their art very personally!

Often the Team Chef. If there are more than one, a Cooking Duel is inevitable.

Naturally the best friend of the Big Eater, if they're not the same person.

This chef may engage in Through His Stomach but as a general expression of affection, or even a generalized benevolence, not a particular sign of deep passion. Your Favorite is similarly not a profound gesture when made by this chef unless it necessarily involves them specially going out of their way to do so. If this chef engages in Through His Stomach or Your Favorite and is a baker, that falls under Sweet Baker. They might provoke a Heel–Face Turn through the power of their cooking. Since both Real Men and Feminine Women Can Cook this character is just as likely to be male as female.

The output of a Supreme Chef is often Food Porn, Impossibly Delicious Food, and Delicious Distraction.

Compare Chef of Iron. Contrast Lethal Chef.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • Belldandy from Ah! My Goddess excels at cooking. Her fellow goddess, Peorth, is no slouch, either. It should also be noted that Belldandy doesn't use her magic in the kitchen, preferring the hands-on approach to make it more special. She was also able to make a decent cook out of Sora Hasagawa, whose nickname was "Chef Assassin".
  • The main character Taisuke from Alive: The Final Evolution is an incredible chef considering the dishes he makes while on the road.
  • As multiple characters in Anpanman are food-based characters, any character with a food theme of prepared food or meal is the master of making that kind of food. Multiple episodes are themed around two of these characters arguing about whose food is the best. However, the number one supreme chef in the series is Uncle Jam. His baked goods win over everyone that tries them, and the head of Anpanman himself is the tastiest food in the series thanks to him.
  • Downplayed in Beauty and the Feast. Yakumo is an excellent cook and pretty much everything she makes will be delicious. But she explicitly has to look elsewhere for inspiration and often copies recipes off the internet.
  • Serpico from Berserk having worked as a servant boy most of his life is a wonderful cook, preparing delicious meals for Guts’s True Companions, even with a humble campfire. When Serpico leaves the party along with Farnese, Guts and the others are motivated to bring them back partly because they would miss his cooking dearly.
  • Black Butler:
    • Both Sebastian Michaelis and Claude Faustus.
    • In addition, Soma's servant Agni is called "the Hand of God". It's not because of any martial arts mastery; it's because he's an impossibly good curry chef.
  • Zero Squad's Kirio Hikifune from Bleach. Both Ichigo and Renji call her food the best thing they've ever tasted. Also, it says a LOT that she's skilled in BOTH Western and Eastern food, as well as pastries. note  It's a plot point, as Hikifune can imbue her food with her own reiatsu and thus power-up those who eat it.
  • Rin from Blue Exorcist, surprisingly (or not, considering he grew up in a monastery with a bunch of bachelors). Shima actually says (in the manga) that "it's truly a taste which wouldn't be put to shame no matter which family you marry into." while in the anime Konekomaru says "you'd make a good wife". Make of those comments as you will. Word of God puts his food at Impossibly Delicious Food levels since he has 100% success rate for all steps and is good at pushing the recipe ahead just so to be perfect.
  • Rin from Bunny Drop is pretty good at cooking for a six-year-old. She cooks better than Daikichi. When Daikichi's cousin sees Rin making breakfast she believes that he is forcing a kid to cook for him, though it turns out Rin just likes to help cook.
  • Almost everyone in Chūka Ichiban!. To add more relevance? A very good chef is named "Senior Chef". An incredible chef? Supreme Chef.
  • Code Geass:
    • Lelouch Lamperouge is one out of necessity of having had to take care of Nunnally for years...and because he's such a Neat Freak that only he is capable of measuring and handling every single ingredient in exactly the way he needs and wants.
    • Milly Ashford, the Cool Big Sis Student Council President, is also an excellent chef, and she's eager to find any excuse to cook or bake. As a matter of fact, she's the only person with whom Lelouch is willing to cook.
  • Crazy Food Truck: Gordon's food is delicious to anyone who tastes it, though usually it's just him and Arisa.
  • Ruruka Andou from Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School is the Super High School Level Confectionist, and can make confections that cause people to experience pure bliss. Episode 8 of the Future arc shows that her chocolates can even put people into a mind-control-like state; it's so good that they'll do anything for more of it. Episode 4 of the Despair arc shows that the only thing strong enough to break that state is laxatives. It's explicitly stated that she does not drug her candy; she makes it taste good the hard way.
  • Unexpectedly enough, Badass Longcoat Anti-Hero Hei from Darker than Black is a very good cook. This is presumably due to a lot of practice and the fact that Real Men Wear Pink.
  • Nanako Misonou, the main character of Dear Brother. She often has baking meetings with her friend Tomoko, and when she learns that Rei is living alone and has few to eat healthy, she decides to cook specifically for her.
  • Parodied in DearS when Ren and Miu compete against each other at school Ren is declared the winner of the cooking contest because her dish is 'the flavor of the cosmos'. This is another case of Bizarre Alien Biology because the food she makes appears (and is to humans) inedible.
  • Senshi of Delicious in Dungeon can turn any of the flora and fauna found in the titular dungeon into mouth-watering Food Porn. Everyone who has tried it so far has raved about how delicious it is. Part of this is because he’s been doing all his own cooking for over a decade, and knows not just how to cook things but the best way to cook them; the other part is that ingredients gathered from inside the dungeon just taste better the deeper the level you get them from.
  • Dragon Ball:
    • Chi-Chi from Dragon Ball Z is known to be a good cook by other characters. This is shown best in a filler episode when she threatens to stop cooking meals for Goku and Piccolo if they didn't go to driving school. Also, Videl commented on her rice and even asked for the recipe, not to mention that Chi-Chi cooks better than any of Mr. Satan's cooks.
    • As it turns out, according to Dragon Ball Super, this is Earth's general hat in the grand scheme of Universe 7. Beerus and Whis are extremely particular about what they eat and have sampled delicacies from across the universe. That said, the food on Earth is so good that even a normal head of lettuce (albeit fresh-picked) appeases their palette (not to mention them referring to Instant Ramen as the greatest delicacy in the universe).
  • Francois from Dr. STONE is a Ryusui's world-class butler and personal caterer and he personally lauds their cooking and insists they be revived for this specific reason. Francois quickly proves to be an absolute beast in the kitchen even prepping Senku's aerospace food and introducing the Kingdom of Science to dishes and flavours beyond their wildest dreams (which may not be saying much considering how primitive their cooking once was, but their skills are more than noteworthy all the same).
  • Miyako Miyamura from ef - a fairy tale of the two.. Explained by her both living on her own and trying to become the best in everything to regain the attention of her divorced and emotionally-neglectful parents.
  • Nearly every recurring chef from Food Wars! fits the bill. Everyone who goes to Tōtsuki Academy actually has a good career in cooking ahead of them even if they end up dropping out or expelled just from the sheer prestige of the school. The actual graduates usually start their own wildly successful restaurants within just a few years. Of course, even as good as the students seem in the present, some are much better than others, such as the Elite Ten, the best student cooks of the entire school from the tenth seat Erina Nakiri, the especially strict resident gourmet to Eishi Tsukasa, the first seat and currently the apex of cooking in Tōtsuki (according to Rindō he's already famous worldwide among gourmands). So supreme doesn't even begin to describe the elite in this manga.
    • Among the adults, special mention must go to Yukihira's father, Jōichirō Saiba. Along with being a former Second Seat, Jōichirō has such a great reputation that when he returned to the high-class cuisine circuit world, figures such as leading medical researchers and politicians, began flocking to him to get a bite. In fact, his food is so good that it can make head priests give up their religion and strip in public to get some! Towards the end of the manga, Jōichirō's son follows the same path as well.
  • Alex from Gangsta. is noted to be a very good cook, her meals are good enough that Doctor Theo takes them as payment for his services. Before Alex was found and rescued, Worick and Nick just had takeout since they both sucked at cooking.
  • Gourmet Girl Graffiti:
    • Ryou cooks well and is called out by her friends to give up drawing and take up catering instead, but her sense of taste is easily affected by her mood, particularly loneliness.
    • Shiina's maid Tsuyuko plainly defeated three three-star chefs.
  • Hayate of Hayate the Combat Butler has this among his "so domestic that women are jealous and threatened" skills. Hinagiku can also cook well enough to impress Hayate, and Maria is shown to be on par with both of them, even able to make things look extremely fancy without sacrificing the taste.
  • Hetalia: Axis Powers:
    • France, befitting both National Stereotypes and his rivalry with Lethal Chef England.
    • According to Word of God, several of the Asians are like this. We already know that China is one since we've seen him cook in canon, but profiles also add info about others:
      About Thailand: "If he cooks it's always something really sweet or really hot. The cooking itself is very delicious."
      About Taiwan: "The good thing about her cooking is that you can thank her for treating you to delicious yet inexpensive cuisine!"
    • Belgium's hinted to be one as well, specially in her Hattafutte Parade where she mentions that she likes to make sweets for her brother and Romano.
    • Austria is one. Considering the rich history behind Austrian cuisine and the fame of its pastries and coffee culture, it's not a surprise.
    • The Gakuen Hetalia strips show Turkey hanging out with the aforementioned France and China in the "Gourmet Club", so he might qualify too. The history and influences behind Turkish cuisine in itself might support this.
  • Issei Hyoudou's mother Miki in High School D×D is a fantastic cook whose dishes impressed Rias Gremory's family when they first met. Impressive, considering they're a wealthy demon family with highly trained caterers at home. Additionally, she's given the moniker of "Four Heavenly Kings" alongside Rias, Asia, and Akeno, all of whom are also highly skilled and lauded cooks.
  • The goal of many characters in Iron Wok Jan is to be this.
  • I Want Your Mother To Be With Me! has Yuzuki's father, the chef at their family restaurant Kobaiken. Yuzuki has shades of this as well and used to go to culinary school. Ryo likes everything she makes him and encourages her to go back to school and follow her dreams.
  • Antonio "Tonio" Trussardi from the fourth part of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is an odd example; his Stand, "Pearl Jam", is centred around making incredibly tasty food that will leave the eater literally spewing their guts out. As it turns out, however, this seemingly nasty side-effect actually leaves them healthier than before; it's actually expelling and replacing damaged/infected tissue. Since Tonio is a professional chef, it's really good food on top of all that. Even the water at his place is godly (and those who didn't sleep well last night will literally cry their eyes out — but then they'll feel refreshed).
  • In Kekkaishi, Yoshimura could count as top-notch when it comes to cooking, especially cooking sweets.
  • Athena Asamiya is implied to be one in the The King of Fighters: KYO manga. In the last volume, she makes dinner for Kensou, Yuki, and Kyo, and the three find the dish she made for them note  to be very good.
  • Kira Kira Happy Hirake Cocotama features a Cocotama chef named Pantonio, whose debut episode features him making a delicious fried rice omelet for Ribbon, Pillow, and Chako as well as an eggplant stew to help the three Cocotamas and their contractor Haruka convince a boy into eating eggplants. The only fault in his cooking is that he tends to make a mess and get covered in soot whenever he does so.
  • Kirby: Right Back at Ya! has Monsieur Goan, whose food becomes so good and affordable that the Cappies would rather eat at his restaurant than at Kawasaki's. It's such a shame that Goan is just another Monster of the Week.
  • Najika, the main character of Kitchen Princess has an absolute sense of taste and is constantly amazing the other characters not just with her delicious food, but often with her presentation, as well. She always thinks about the person she's cooking for and makes a dish to suit them.
  • In Love Hina, Keitaro, Mutsumi, and Shinobu are this and are the Team Chefs of the band. In Keitaro's case, it's mostly a matter of his desserts being absurdly delicious, in part due to making his own Valentine's chocolate (to seem like less of a loser in public) and in part due to the Urashima family being a line of confectioners.
  • Lyrical Nanoha:
  • Cooking is one of the many talents of Usui Takumi in Maid-Sama!, as revealed when he begins helping out in the kitchen of the maid cafe where Misaki works.
  • Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: Tohru turns out to be a shockingly talented cook. Though she has a bad tendency of trying to get Kobayashi to eat her tail. And also using Black Magic spells on her food to make it taste better.
  • Mister Ajikko has many characters qualifying this trope due to the prevalence of literal Cooking Duel being an important plot device. Therefore, this applies to the culinary prodigy that Yoichi is, as well as anyone who can rival him in said Cooking Duel.
  • Kimihito in Monster Musume is the Team Chef. All his cooking is good, and on multiple occasions, he's prepared gourmet restaurant-quality meals using whatever stock he had on hand. Including once at an actual gourmet restaurant where he was able to prepare a huge feast after the kitchen was sabotaged using stingrays and the remains of the kitchen's ingredients that were still good.
  • Mai Tokiha from My-HiME is such a good cook that her adopted friend Mikoto even cries when she has to settle for someone else's ramen. Though there were other factors involved at the same time...
  • My Monster Secret: Aizawa is one of these, but only for cakes and similar desserts. She's capable of making an enormous multi-tier wedding cake in a matter of minutes, and her chocolates are so good that Akane threatened to destroy the earth in order to get more of them. Oddly, Aizawa barely seems to be aware that she has this skill.
  • Millefeuille in Mysterious Joker is such an amazing chef that anyone who tries her cooking can't stop eating. She was able to capture Queen by simply feeding the girl some of her cooking, and the girl ended up willingly gorging herself so much that she became enormously fat in a single night and perfectly content not to escape if it meant leaving the food. She would have done the same to Joker if he hadn't protected himself from the food's taste.
  • Yamino from Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok. He's good enough to satisfy even Thor.
  • Naruto:
    • Teuchi and his daughter Ayame. There is a reason why Naruto (and a lot of other characters) prefers their ramen shop over places in Konoha.
    • Kushina, Naruto's mother, was apparently an excellent cook; her husband Minato especially adored her meals.
    • Hinata similarly is wonderful at cooking as reported by her husband Naruto and children. In Boruto, Hanabi gets pissed off when her titular nephew states he much prefers Hinata's cooking to hers.
    • Played for Laughs with Shima, who is known to be an excellent cook in Mount Myoboku. Problem is, she is a frog, and her specialty is insect ramen, which frogs love, but is absolutely disgusting to humans (as Naruto learns the hard way). That said, she can cook perfectly decent human meals.
    • Itachi. No, seriously. He makes some delicious-looking eggs in Filler. However, he's such a perfectionist that he scraps everything and starts again just because there was a bit of eggshell left on the yolk.
    • In Rock Lee's Springtime of Youth, Naruto compliments Sakura's cooking while Lee and Neji claim Tenten's cooking is better, though both girls are overcome with joy hearing this. However, Shikamaru and Choji in their turn make no comment about Ino's cooking, much to her fury.
  • Satsuki Yotsuba in Negima! Magister Negi Magi is likely the best cook in her school, which is quite impressive given that said school has over 30,000 students. She even has her own (extremely successful) restaurant. To give an idea of her skill, one sip of her stamina soup was enough to make Negi go from tired to Hot-Blooded.
  • Shinji Ikari of Neon Genesis Evangelion was often shown doing the cooking, and being the best at it in his household. Of course, his only competition was Misato, who subsisted on takeout and beer before he came along. Still, Fanon began to hold the view that Shinji was a master chef, and the Rebuild of Evangelion movies decided to run with this idea. His cooking is so good, even Asuka didn't want to share hers with anyone when he made lunch.
  • There a whole bunch of these and wannabes in Oishinbo.
  • One Piece:
    • Sanji is this hands-down. He can tell the ingredients that went into a cake's confection by smell alone. While his cooking for the Straw Hats is already quite sublime, when under pressure to create something really good he can be outright dangerous; his whipped cream was apparently so delicious it nearly killed a guy, and knocked Capone Bege out for a loop for a few seconds and left him thinking he had been brainwashed.
    • "Red Leg" Zeff, Sanji's mentor and father figure, is an excellent chef as well, being the owner of the floating restaurant Baratie.
    • Charlotte Pudding is an excellent chef, but an especially great chocolatier; her chocolate confections are unrivaled. Her sister Charlotte Chiffon is another excellent chef, with her own specialty being her namesake, the chiffon cake. Both of them and Sanji team up in the Whole Cake Island arc to make the best damn wedding cake there is, to quell Big Mom's hunger-induced rampage.
    • Surprisingly, Nami is actually a wonderful cook and is the only other crewmate besides Sanji who actually knows how to, Luffy and Usopp in particular claim her meals were delicious in the crew's early days. However, the catch is Nami charges high every time she cooks and the boys didn't have the funds to keep up. When Sanji leaves the crew in Zou, Nami cooks again (after Luffy nearly gets them all killed) though she uses one of Sanji's recipes.
    • Kozuki Oden from Wano was a surprisingly good chef as he cooked delicious Oden hotpot for his Retainers in their many travels and later Oden cooks a nabemono banquet for the Roger Pirates while sailing the seas with them.
    • Dracule Mihawk, apart from being the world’s greatest swordsman, is also a very skilled chef, as seen in the anime.
  • Shouma Takakura from Penguindrum. His sister Himari is a rather decent one, but Shouma is still the best of the two.
  • Pokémon: The Series: In the main cast, at least one of the main characters takes up the role of Team Chef. They often qualify as this trope due to the fact that most of the other members cannot cook anything decent to save their lives.
    • Brock has learned to be a great chef from years of taking care of his siblings.
    • Later on in the Black & White series, Cilan fills this role as his gym's general theme is that of a restaurant and is dressed as a waiter.
    • In XY, this role is split between Clemont and Serena: Clemont handles the main courses as he likens cooking to inventing, while Serena is better at making desserts.
    • Mallow from Sun & Moon mainly cooks in her family's restaurant so she's naturally this. She also happens to be the first female character to take up this role after having only male characters being the Supreme Chef of the main cast.
  • Diamond from Pokémon Adventures is discovered to be this later on; Pearl isn't so surprised.
  • Tomoka Osakada from The Prince of Tennis, maker of excellent bentos. Justified since she's said to frequently help her parents to take care of her two cute little brothers, thus she often ends up as the default cook at home. She's also a sort-of subversion, as she's the tomboy in a Tomboy and Girly Girl duo and thus she defies the Feminine Women Can Cook stereotype. Not that Sakuno isn't a good chef, but Tomoka is mentioned to be the one with better cooking skills.
  • Princess Connect! Re:Dive: Pecorine is at once one of Landosol's greatest chefs and its most enthusiastic eaters. At one point, she prepares a pudding so good that it nearly sends a pudding-obsessed ghost to the next life in a cloud of special effects and cherubs.
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica:
    • Mami Tomoe according to Kyouko's comments in the Drama CD. The cakes she served to Sayaka and Madoka when they dropped by her flat? They might have been baked by Mami herself, which makes her eventual fate all the more ironic.
    • Madoka's father Tomohisa is an excellent cook. This is justified since his wife Junko is often at work and is the main breadwinner of the family, so he takes care of the house.
  • Ranma ½:
    • Ranma Saotome and all of his female suitors other than Akane are one of these (and Akane wants to be one).
    • Ranma's mother, Nodoka, is supposed to be truly remarkable — as spoken by a man who often indulges in every kind of food he can snatch.
    • Kasumi Tendō of course, in her role as replacement mom for the Tendo household. Her food is supposedly on the same level as Nodoka's — in other words, pretty much perfect.
  • A subverted version of this comes to play in Reborn! (2004) when Bianchi actually tries to cook normally, unlike her normal Poison Cooking. They all thought it was delicious... Until they felt all hell turning inside their stomachs. Reborn even commented that she actually created a new, time-delayed Poison Cooking.
  • Kurumu Kurono from Rosario + Vampire makes such good cookies that even she can't resist them, even when she knows they're poisoned! Oh, and she was the one who poisoned them to begin with.
  • Makoto Kino AKA Sailor Jupiter of Sailor Moon. All the other Senshi love her cooking and a few episodes of the original anime have them turning to her for cooking instructions.
  • Shirokuma of Shirokuma Cafe, especially since he's a polar bear. Sasako the waitress is no slouch as she runs the place when Shirokuma is away.
  • In Sword Art Online, Asuna was one of the precious few players who worked on leveling their cooking stat in the game, going so far as to max it out. This allows her to make a delicious stew out of ingredients from the ultra-rare Ragout Rabbit, as well as experiment with mixing different materials together to simulate real-world condiments such as mayonnaise and soy sauce. Her cooking skills in the real world are equally impressive.
  • Tenchi Muyo!:
    • Sasami is an excellent chef. In the manga, she was so good that she even baked her sister a carrot cake that she loves despite the fact that Ayeka hates carrots. Sasami even competes in an Iron Chef-style Cooking Duel with several other child chefs. In Sasami: Magical Girls Club, though it's the spinoff most far removed from the source material, this remains. Sasami Iwakura cooking for her family while her parents sit and await her masterpiece is not an uncommon sight, and this version is not Really 700 Years Old.
    • Airi, who in her spare time between running Galaxy Police Academy, politicking, spying, and berserking when someone would call her "granma", runs a very successful little restaurant.
  • In Tokyo Ghoul, Yoriko Kosaka is mentioned to be aiming to become a professional chef after she graduates high school. Arata Kirishima and Haise Sasaki are both mentioned to be excellent cooks, which is made more impressive since both are Ghouls — all human food tastes vile to them, making it impossible to know whether their cooking is any good. People love their cooking anyway, with Big Eater Saiko considering Haise's cooking one of her top priorities.
  • A large portion of the cast from Toriko are this. As they are in the 'Gourmet Age,' great chefs are practically the world's equivalent of royalty. The legendary 'Goddess of Chefs' Frohze cooked dishes so amazing she stopped an era of war, as well as Setsuno, who runs a restaurant renowned for its amazing food. Toriko's Heterosexual Life-Partner Komatsu is noted to have incredible potential and is already a renowned chef himself.
  • Hinano and her pancakes from Trouble Chocolate.
  • Strangely, Lum of Urusei Yatsura is both this AND a Lethal Chef. This is due to the fact that all her cooking is made for her own Bizarre Alien Biology; humans get sick eating it (and most of it looks awful too) due to how horribly spicy it is, while the aliens can withstand it much better and love it to death.
  • Sunako from The Wallflower is an excellent cook, especially with Japanese food.
  • In the elementary Wandering Son chapters it's shown Nitori can bake quite well, though she's never shown cooking anything else.
  • The Way of the Househusband: The main character Tatsu is a retired Yakuza member who is known to attend cooking classes and can cook several gourmet dishes.
    • He is known to whip up tea and pastries at a moment's notice, anywhere.
    • For a midnight snack, he ends up preparing salmon with rich cream sauce and herbal tea.
  • Kakei from What Did You Eat Yesterday? is one of these, in a manga that centers around Food Porn.
  • Amazingly exaggerated in Yakitate!! Japan, where most characters are such Supreme Chefs (well, bakers to be more specific) that their food can cause crazy involuntary reactions (up to and including Involuntary Shapeshifting,) warp reality, cause Cosmic Retcons and even affect the real-life manga itself.
  • Yumeiro Pâtissière involves "St. Marie Academy" a school where students learn to become supreme pastry chefs (although main character Ichigo Amano started out as the other kind before invoking this trope).

    Comic Books 
  • The DCU:
    • Alfred Pennyworth from Batman, being a world-class butler, is of course a great chef as well. Anyone who stays at Wayne Manor usually comments on his delectable meals. Alfred passed on his culinary talents to Dick, Tim, and eventually Damian.
    • Ma Hunkle (the original Red Tornado) was this during the Golden Age, to the point of being chef for the Justice Society of America the times she appeared with them.
    • Wonder Woman: Ferdinand, the world-class chef who works at the Themysciran Embassy. He's also a minotaur. In Justice League (2018), he becomes the chef for the Hall of Justice and is stated to be able to perfectly recreate any dish the person has ever eaten, even old favorites from their younger days, just by having the dish described to him.
  • Marvel Universe:
    • Edwin Jarvis from the The Avengers has cooked entire feasts for Earth's mightiest heroes.
    • Deadpool is a good cook... well, when it comes to pancakes, at least.
    • The Mighty Thor:
      • Thor Odinson himself is a surprisingly good chef as he whips up steaks, hamburgers, veggie burgers, hot dogs, and dozen pies for the Avengers and other heroes. Given Thor that is thousands of years old, it's not too surprising that he'd pick up a few unconventional skills.
      • Thor's buddy Volstagg is also a great cook, or so he boasts; he did run a cooking show on Earth, which gives some credence to his boast.
      • Loki in his solo series reveals that he is quite skilled at cooking as well and prefers Earth cuisine to Asgardain cooking.
    • Silver Sable of the Wild Pack proves to be one in a What If? scenario which ends with her and Spider-Man falling in love.
    • Taskmaster, due to his Photographic Memory and Crazy-Prepared nature, is a truly excellent chef.
    • X-Men:
      • Though it is rarely shown, Magneto is a highly skilled cook who knows how to create delicious meals even with few ingredients to work with. This is actually justified, given that he grew up in the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz and developed these skills for the survival of himself and his family.
      • Gambit is noted to be quite a good cook, especially when it comes to his famous Gumbo and other Cajun recipes, and is the one team member who is most commonly seen in the mansion's kitchen.
      • Rogue isn't too shabby when it comes to cooking, as she once baked a delicious boysenberry pie for the aforementioned Gambit, which he destroyed when he used it as a projectile weapon against Bishop but missed and hit Rogue instead (much to her fury). In later comics, Rogue often helps Gambit in the kitchen.
      • Jean Grey in the early days was apparently a good cook. In a much later comic, she even prepares a feast for a bunch of aliens with Scarlet Witch.
      • Wolverine is a surprisingly decent cook, though he tends to be overzealous when it comes to dicing ingredients with his claws.
  • Disney Ducks Comic Universe:
    • Grandma Duck is one of these; her famous cooking skills are central to many of the plots of the stories starring (or just featuring) her.
    • Though it varies heavily from story to story, her grandson Donald Duck is often depicted as having inherited at least some of her skill around the kitchen. While some writers love to portray him as a Lethal Chef (and he probably shouldn't be allowed to experiment too much), the most common interpretation is that he's a very good cook and could probably have made a decent living as a professional chef if it hadn't been for his Hair-Trigger Temper, Miles Gloriosus tendencies and constant bad luck.
    • Gus Goose, another of Grandma Duck's grandsons and her farm help, is actually a pretty great cook as well. He's just far more interested in eating than cooking, so it doesn't come up very often.
    • Brigitta McBridge is another excellent cook, and, differently from Donald, is actually capable of turning a profit out of it, even starting businesses (and large-scale ones) from time to time. Part of her success is that she knows where to find the best ingredients, even in the most unlikely locations — such as the titular strawberries from "Brigitta's Strawberries", a unique variety that grew only on the bottom of the ocean.
    • Quackmore, Scrooge's butler, is extremely good at creating good meals on the extremely tight budget Scrooge leaves him on. At least one story posits that this is actually how he got his job, with the job interview including having the candidates cook something from very few ingredients and his meal was so good Scrooge ended the interview and hired him then and there.
  • Ramen from Dollicious, as well her sisters. They run a restaurant and are all excellent cooks, but Ramen is noted to be the best one of them all and adored by the rest of the siblings and friends for her talents.
  • Mickey Mouse Comic Universe: There was a story where two of these chefs dueled for the Supremest Chef. Somehow Goofy sneaked into the contest. If you think you know the outcome now: The local villain hypnotized the chefs to steal their secret master recipes (they all became a Lethal Chef while hypnotized), and inadvertently also Goofy, turning him from Lethal Chef into this trope.
  • One of the children attending PS238 has a metahuman ability to turn anything into food, and he can decide how nutritious or fattening the food will be. In one instance he produced something that tasted like a high-quality chocolate-covered ice cream bar while having the calories and nutritional value of a fresh salad. However, he can't change the appearance of what he's converted, so food that he makes from rocks still looks like rocks.
  • Gribaldi of Red Sonja: The Art of Blood and Fire is known as literally the greatest chef in the world. He proves it by routinely cooking forage into gourmet meals.
  • Chef Smurf in The Smurfs is this (also applies to The Smurfs film series). In the Animated Adaptation, his character is combined with Greedy Smurf (see below).

    Comic Strips 
  • Blondie (1930): Dagwood, the protagonist (and husband of the titular character). He likes to cook almost as much as he likes to eat and is so great at making sandwiches, he has one named after him.
  • Garfield: Jon's mother is a great cook, especially when it comes to baking pies and preparing potatoes. She once prepared a meal with eight kinds of potatoes (her personal best).
  • Nodwick: Piffany can end wars with a brownie, and her cookies can tame Eldritch Abominations and even end quarrels among the gods themselves.

    Fan Works 
  • Meng Yao is one of these in Best of My Love. He wants to go to culinary school to be a chef full-time.
  • Hetalia: Axis Powers fanfic Cucinando…Sōkoku?: The Vicciola Pepper Filet Mignon and Kobe Beef Tataki Italy and Japan made were so impossibly delicious, they incited several...very interesting...reactions from the other nations present.
    Within several seconds, everyone had received their plates and silverware courtesy of a certain speedster. "Buon appetito!"
    "Dōzo omeshiagarikudasai." Italy returned to Japan's side. Both watched everyone take their first bite from each platter...
    ...and subsequently gobble all of the food down. "OH MY GOD!" America turned into goop.
    "Blimey!" England literally fell backwards from his seat.
    It was only because of America—despite being goop—swooping in did no cutlery clatter onto the ground. "I'm a hero!"
    "...Humph." England proceeded to continue eating the succulent cuisine upon taking it back with red tinting his cheeks.
    China began freaking out. "AIYAH! I LOVE BOTH THESE DISHES MORE THAN PANDAS AND SHINATTY-CHAN COMBINED-ARU!" To get such a compliment from such an incredible cook. Pandas. Shinatty-chan.
    "..." Vietnam was rendered speechless.
    Taiwan beamed. "OH MY GOSH!"
    "I could munch on these meats forever!" South Korea could not even uphold his usual disdain towards his elder sibling. The food was just too good.
    Thailand smiled. "This is incredible."
    "Oh. My. Glob!" Poland squealed.
    Russia melted into a puddle on the floor. "VKUSNO!"
    "SO GOOD!" Hungary fangirled nearly as hard as she did over boys' love. Boys' love.
  • Ere we go, Pluz Ultra!: Inko's baked goods are apparently absolutely amazing, with Momo insisting all the award-winning confectionaries she'd eaten from world-famous bakers tasted like dirt by comparison and Sato deciding to seek her out for pointers.
  • God of War: Chains of the Heart: Sora's noted, and frequently shown, to be an amazing cook, often putting his knowledge of preparing meals from other worlds to good use. Much of his free time is spent cooking either for nearby villages or his friends, and everyone has something positive to say about his culinary craftsmanship.
  • Mikuru in Kyon: Big Damn Hero, after several training sessions.
  • In Scar Tissue, everyone loves Shinji's cooking and praises his skills.
  • Unfinished Business (The Thing): Irina is built up as one, and when it comes time for the protagonists to actually eat, she delivers. Of course given that most of them have been living in Antarctica for long periods of time they probably don't exactly have the same standards as high-class restaurant critics, but her skills are said to be rather impressive.
  • Greedy Smurf in Empath: The Luckiest Smurf, though here he isn't the only chef in the village.
  • In Legion of Super-Heroes fanfics there were many stories that contained Timber Wolf being this after it was revealed in the first season finale that he liked to bake and that he made cookies (as commented by Lightning Lad). The fact that his VA played a well-known character who was a Supreme Chef may have helped.
  • Peeta Mellark in When The Moon Fell In Love With The Sun. The fact that the story is told from the point of view of Katniss, who, until some point after the fic begins, has been living on little food, only adds to it.
  • Ron Stoppable from Kim Possible tends to be portrayed as a culinary master far beyond even what the show provided. One example is from Vacation from the Norm where Ron is actually a sous chef for a super fancy restaurant not even a year after high school finishes.
  • Speaking of Ron Stoppable, in the Star Trek fusion Kim Possible: The Next Generation, he's a professional chef while Kim serves on the Enterprise... he's so skilled that Q himself goes to 23rd Century Earth on a regular basis for Ron's signature dish. When he eventually sets up shop on the Enterprise, he's acknowledged to have mastered the preparation of glagh by Klingon High Command.
  • Sirius in A Not So Ordinary Day.
    Remus: Always so modest when it comes to your cooking skills. And yet, your cooking is the only thing I've ever seen Moody run for outside of a battle.
    Sirius: Moody doesn't count, with the man's own lack of cooking skills it's not surprising he would run for a decent meal.
    Remus: Yet he has never run if Lily or I cooked. Nor have I ever seen him run for Molly's cooking. Yet, when learning you were cooking he immediately invited himself over after Order meetings. McGonagall too.
  • The Differentverse: Pinkie Pie, per canon. Twilight compliments her on this (though not to her face) when, in conversation with Moondancer, she remarks that they're bound to widen their waistlines by living in the same town as her.
  • Martha Kent from The Institute Saga. The superhero community seems to be addicted to her cookies. Her chocolate pudding (with sauce!) is good enough to get Wolverine to abandon a fight against Sabertooth!
  • Parodied in Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!. Lexi Luthor puts painstaking effort into her lunch boxes to make them perfectly resemble the ones seen in anime down to the last grain of rice. She also puts similar amounts of effort into making it taste "aggressively average" so she could have a meal that anyone could eat regardless of genre or plot. It's so average that it blows away everyone present, as they all expected one of the richest teenagers in the world to have a similarly decadent lunch.
    Izuku: Alexis-san’s food isn’t great, nor is it terrible; it’s just average. Aggressively average, even. The flavor of the food tastes like anything I could eat on any given day, but as I was eating her rice and her wiener--I mean hot dog!—I could tell that it was constructed with the kind of expert craftsmanship that takes years of training to obtain. All of that is there, yet it still tastes like something you can buy at a train station or a convenience store! Alexis-san, did you go out of your way to have this food taste average?
    Alexis: [smug and proud] What part of ‘stereotypical box lunch of a Japanese student’ did you miss, Izuku? If I had it taste better or worse than that, then it would be reflective of a specific character type, and all I want to do is have the kind of meal that any sort of character can eat, regardless of the genre and plot.
  • Harry Potter's cooking is so good in Summer With Tonky that it's one of the reasons Tonks set up some wards that'll prevent Harry from leaving her apartment. Later, some homemade fudge that Harry considers "so bad he almost threw it out" rather than include it in Tonks' lunch is good enough to seemingly cause an orgasm in anyone who tastes it.
  • Gym Leader Wiki: Brock is supreme at making food for both humans and Pokémon. He has released two critically acclaimed cookbooks — Rock-Solid Recipes: Food For the Soul and PokéCook: Keeping Your Pokémon Healthy. He's also a regular on Iron Chef.
  • It's offhandedly mentioned in My Hero School Adventure Is All Wrong As Expected Sidestory that after his sister's Super-Senses became too much for her to appreciate normal food, Hachiman made sure to pick up an olfactory-related Quirk and trained with it to the point that he could make dishes that would satisfy even her superpower enhanced palette.
  • Fate/Black Dawn: As in canon, cooking is the one thing that Shirou takes pride in. There are a lot of other things he's great at, but cooking is a battlefield he refuses to ever lose in. In medieval Britain, he doesn't have very good materials to work with, but Morgan and Mordred are quickly enamored with his cooking, and the castle staff swear he used magic. This might be a reference to how a lot of the world considers British food to be terrible.
  • In A Peaceful Afterlife, Yoshikage Kira's cooking is praised by pretty much every character, including Alastor (who admits he usually prefers Western food). He says it's because he cooked for himself so much in life, and in Hell the only way he could get decent food was to make it himself.
  • Junior Officers: Sarabi is a talented cook, likely due to her neglected upbringing.
  • Rolo from We Can Be Heroes is a master chef being forced to slum it by cooking in the ridiculously unpleasant city of Krapton on the even more unpleasant planet Dizmol thanks to trouble with the local mafia family. But he makes the most of it by serving top-tier seafood with an unfailingly cheerful, upbeat attitude, and his delicious cooking and positive outlook on life endear him to Lapis the moment she meets him.
  • You Are (Not) At Fault: No matter how much she complains about Shinji's maddening habits and traits, Asuka would never slam his cook.
    Whatever else she said about the Third Child, she privately admitted that he knew how to cook like a professional chef.
  • The Pros and Cons to living a triple life: Sora has become an amazing chef thanks to his experiences at Le Grande Bistro in Kingdom Hearts III ("The head chef was pretty controlling, but he taught me well."), allowing him to very quickly take over the Shujin Academy Culinary Arts club without even trying.
  • This trope is all over Harry Potter and the Lack of Lamb Sauceplayed straight, subverted, discussed and played with. There are a lot of talented chefs in the cast, but the story makes it clear that talent can only take you so far and the real key to success with cooking is hard work and perseverance... only to then twist things around and show that sometimes hard work isn't enough either, and to stand above the rest, you do need a certain amount of talent... plus a fair amount of passion, a good mix of rigidness and flexibility, and not least a willingness to think outside the box and experiment, while still tampering it with some common sense to avoid that the experimentation goes out of hand. Whenever a MagicChef Junior contestant is eliminated from the contest, it's usually because they have failed in one or more of these categories.
  • In Way of the Magic Househusband Ron wolfs down an entire plate of ebi after tasting Harry's cooking for the first time.
    Ron: Hermione? Marry this man.
    Hermione: Wha? What do you-?
    Ron: IF YOU WON'T I WILL!
  • White Knight Errant: Velvet Scarletina's cooking is so good that food she "quickly slapped together in a rush" makes openly racist Cardin moan in pleasure. When Coco merely holds onto her sandwich rather than eat it, her teammates tell her that if she wastes Velvet's food, she's no longer team leader and that they'll go to war for her cooking.

    Films — Animation 
  • The Other Mother in Coraline is shown to be able to whip out what is basically the very definition of Food Porn at a moment's notice.
  • Po of Kung Fu Panda cooks the best noodles the Furious Five have ever tasted in their lives. His father is even better.
  • My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Friendship Games: Pinkie Pie proves to be just as good a baker as her pony counterpart, by creating a cake (with Fluttershy's help) containing a reproduction of the Mona Lisa inside it.
  • Ratatouille:
    • Remy is one despite being a rat. He whipped up a ratatouille that caused Anton Ego to flashback to his childhood. This carries over to Kingdom Hearts III, where Remy is able to use Sora's body to whip up delicious meals.
    • Also the late Auguste Guesteau, whose restaurant is central of the setting of the film.
  • Tiana, from The Princess and the Frog. Her dream is to open a restaurant.
  • Kronk, from The Emperor's New Groove. Spinach puffs are his specialty.
  • Rapunzel from Tangled is shown to be good at baking. She baked a pie and has made delicious frying pan cookies.
  • In Turning Red, Jin is frequently seen in the kitchen cooking deliciously animated meals.
  • Judy of Zootopia is stunned when she goes home and finds out that Gideon Grey, the fox that had bullied her as a child, has become an amazing pastry chef with a successful business.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Chu, from Eat Drink Man Woman. When he starts making school lunches for the little girl next door, she soon gets students mobbing her in the cafeteria with orders for the next day's meal.
  • Wan from Flavour Of Happiness.
  • Martha and Mario from Mostly Martha; also Kate and Nick from the remake No Reservations (2007).
  • Babette in, unsurprisingly, Babette's Feast.
  • A major plot point in Simply Irresistible. Sarah Michelle Gellar's character is the daughter of a Supreme Chef, but failing to follow in her footsteps. Then (apparently) she finds a magical crab (Don't Ask) who 'inspires' her to such culinary heights that Sean Patrick Flannery accuses her of enchanting him via her food.
  • Zeke from High School Musical is a basketball player who secretly loves to bake, and gives some cookies to Sharpay, who acts very dismissive of him and his crush on her. How good are those cookies? At the end of the movie, after she actually eats them, Sharpay quite literally runs into his arms, begging for more, and lets out a Squee when Zeke offers to make her a creme brule next. Apparently Through His Stomach goes both ways.
  • Gregory's Girl: Steve is extremely serious about his cooking, which even the headmaster enjoys.
  • Georgia (Queen Latifah) in Last Holiday, is so much this that the celebrity chef of the Grand Hotel Püpp (Gérard Depardieu) not only becomes instant friends (almost Plug 'n' Play Friends with shades of Tastes Like Friendship, as her admires her as a Big Eater) with her but allows her to cook in his kitchen, though he is also a Supreme Chef.
  • In A Recipe for Seduction, Harland is presented as an excellent chef, first working at an exclusive restaurant before becoming the new chef for Bunny and Jessica. He boasts about having a secret chicken recipe he wants to change the world with, and at the end, his new restaurant becomes successful.
  • Royal Rendezvous: Cat is still a humble chef who still works in a food truck, but is so talented in her Colombian cuisine that she has become internationally famous. Even Edwina and Perry end up enjoying her dishes, despite being total snobs.
  • In The Story of Luke, Luke is a talented cook. His favorite TV show is At Home with Arlene Williams, from which he has learned to make 23 dishes. He teaches Cindy how to make some of them, although she struggles to make anything edible without Luke's close supervision.
  • Speaking of Gérard Depardieu, he is also this as title character François Vatel in Vatel. M. Vatel was sought after by Louis XIV for his own kitchen due to his skill (and yes, that actually happened).

    Literature 
  • Nene in The Ambition of Oda Nobuna can make grass into a delicious meal. Really.
  • This is why Amelia Bedelia, the protagonist of the children's book series of the same name, always keeps her job; she's somewhat of a ditz who's so Literal-Minded, she always messes up her instructions by taking figures of speech and various terminology too literally. (For instance, when told to put out the lights, she puts them out on the clothesline.) Nonetheless, she's always forgiven by her employers because her baking is second to none.
  • Angela Nicely:
    • According to Angela in “Cupcake Wars!”, Mrs. Nicely makes “amazing cakes”.
    • In “Cupcake Wars!”, Angela is sure that Mrs. Charmers made Tiffany’s cupcakes since they’re so immaculate.
  • Ascendance of a Bookworm:
    • Played With in Maine's case; while her food is considered extremely good, this is only a relative thing. She's in the middle ages, meaning there's no culture of professional restaurants or particularly advanced recipes. As such, simple things like pancakes come across as amazing food.
    • The Guildmaster's cook Leise was hired from a noble household who wouldn't give her a position on par with her talents because of her lack of connections. She's shown to be able to make a good approximation of a recipe Myne remembers from Earth based only on verbal instructions, on first try.
  • Surprisingly for someone living in Perpetual Poverty, Akihisa Yoshii from Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts is painted to be the best cook around, and could actually make a career out of this. If only he didn't spend all his allowance on video games and instead bought some ingredients, he would be guaranteed to amaze his friends on a daily basis. Alas, a fraction of ramen, water, salt, and sugar are close enough for him, and he won't see a need to cook unless someone (like his sister) demands him to do so. Contrast Mizuki Himeji, who is more than happy to serve her friends some of her home cooking on a regular basis, but is guaranteed to decommission the eater.
  • The Belgariad: Skill, study, and over 3000 years of practice have made Polgara the Sorceress the best cook in the world. When she leaves her incognito life at Faldor's farm in the first book, her departure from the kitchen is dearly mourned.
    Less fortunate men who worked at other farms were frequently seen, after several pots of ale, to weep openly at descriptions of one of Aunt Pol's roasted geese...
  • Blue Moose: The protagonist Mr. Brenton is an excellent chef with a popular cafe, but no one ever compliments his food until the moose shows up.
  • In the Chalet School books, the Maynard family maid, Anna, and Karen, the school cook, both qualify. The former makes a mean jam (as seen in A Feud in the Chalet School), and the latter's bread twists are often described as 'heavenly'.
  • Mr. Willy Wonka is this on a grand scale — he is the inventor of all of the Impossibly Delicious Food that his chocolate factory, the biggest in the world, produces. In order to protect his recipes from rival candy makers, he was forced to become a Reclusive Artist, which only made him more of a Living Legend.
  • The main character in Joanne Harris' Chocolat and The Film of the Book is a chocolatier whose creations are mouth-watering enough to win over an entire town of strict Catholics during Lent.
  • Lydda the griffin in Dark Lord of Derkholm is a fantastic cook, despite only being thirteen or so. She's an oddball for a griffin in that she prefers her food cooked to raw, but none of her family members will turn down her "godlike snacks."
  • Terry Pratchett's Discworld:
    • Glenda Sugarbean who runs the Unseen University's Night Kitchen is so talented that Vetinari is willing to take her food untested — she would never poison anyone, not out of respect for him but out of respect for the food — and considers telling the guards to throw away her jammy devil bribes "a crime against high art". Apparently all of the Sugarbean women qualify: her grandmother Augusta used to be the cook at the Assassin's Guild where she made the world's best bubble and squeak (she left Glenda the recipe) and refused to let any of the students use her cakes for poisoning practice — and they obeyed because no one wants to upset a good cook.
    • Nanny Ogg publically scorns the idea of Through His Stomach, but knows an array of recipes for aphrodisiac dishes, like Carrot 'n' Oyster Pie or Chocolate Sauce Surprise, that can leave almost anyone except Granny Weatherwax burning up with lust, as seen in Maskerade.
    • Wienrich and Boettcher, Ankh-Morpork chocolatiers, are the absolute creme de la creme in their profession. Their storefront has a discreet drain so the drool of the street onlookers doesn't pool. Contrasting with regular Morporkian chocolate, which is considered a form of cheese and only barely avoids the "tile grout" designation on grounds of color, a partial list of ingredients in their products includes: "sugar, milk, butter, vanilla, cream, hazelnuts, almonds, walnuts, raisins, orange peel, various liqueurs, citrus pectin, strawberries, raspberries, essence of violets, cherries, pineapples, pistachios, oranges, lemons, coffee, cocoa..."
  • Dracula. Yes, that Dracula. In the original Bram Stoker novel, when Harker is staying at Castle Dracula, he notes in his journal that the food is very good. Later, it's revealed that there are no servants (it would be tough to get people to work for a, y'know, vampire) and Dracula has been doing all the work, such as cooking. Apparently, when you're an undying abomination you have time to pick up a culinary hobby. Either him or his wives.
  • In the Dragaera series, Valabar's restaurant is a Family Business going back millennia, with food so good that its reputation completely overcomes anti-Easterner Fantastic Racism, its former employees are snapped up by Dragaeran noble houses, and its premises are a de facto Truce Zone for the various political and criminal factions.
  • Charity Carpenter from The Dresden Files. According to Harry, "She could whip up a five-course meal for twelve from an egg, two spaghetti noodles, some household chemicals, and a stick of chewing gum." Too bad that gene apparently skipped over Molly.
  • In Durarara!!, the artist of the light novels drew up a picture of all the girls involved in a cooking contest. Most of them vary between not very good to horrifically bad, but Namie Yagiri and Mika Harima get scores of 95 and 100, respectively. Interestingly, these are both the girls who cook for Seiji.
  • In David R. Palmer's Emergence, the eleven-year-old boy who calls himself "Adam" turns out to be this, among other skills unlikely for the son of wealth and privilege. Granted that he's a mutant super-genius, it's still odd, and protagonist/narrator Candy (also an eleven-year-old mutant super-genius) comments on it, that Adam chose to include world-class cooking among his skills. Susceptible readers may gain five pounds just from the description given of the "work of sheerest culinary artistry" he prepares for Candy in the course of one day.
  • Thomas Lieven in "Es muss nicht immer Kaviar sein" by Austrian 60s/70s bestseller author Johannes Mario Simmel. He's an unintentional adventurer/spy and thus reaches a bit into Chef of Iron. Once a creation of his (pastete ou train miniature) even saved his ass.
  • The title character of Franny K. Stein has gourmet cooking as one of her special talents.
  • Mei Kobina, of Girls Kingdom is a supreme patisserie chef, who happily shows off her skills to Misaki and Kirara before the battle to get Sara to join one of three salons interested in her. She makes a Swiss roll that looks so good they think it must be store-bought, and tastes so good that they want more. Afterwards, when they mention it to the other Sky Salon members, they receive comments from others that they knew it was that good.
  • Harry's Mad: In Madison/Mad's opinion, Harry's mother is this — his former owner baked as a hobby, but Mrs. Holdman is far better.
  • House-elves from Harry Potter, fitting their nature as the ultimate servants. Even Kreacher whips up excellent meals once he truly accepts Harry as his new master.
  • Oddly enough, Haruhi in Haruhi Suzumiya turns out to be this as part of her Team Mom persona later in the books. She says she learned because her mom is a Lethal Chef. When she cooks for a sick brigade member Kyon thinks it might actually work.
    Kyon: I could easily see your average cold virus fleeing in the face of this kind of power. Any bacteria with an instinct for self-preservation would be wanting out about now.
  • Honor Harrington has had no less than three Supreme Chefs in her household(s): Her steward James MacGuiness, her Grayson cook Mistress Thorne, and her father Alfred Harrington (who has a Friendly Rivalry with Mistress Thorne).
  • Peeta Mellark from The Hunger Games. More like a Supreme Baker since he's never shown cooking food, but everyone seems to love the things he bakes.
  • The volatile and mercenary French chef Anatole in P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories. He serves as a Living MacGuffin, with various Upper Class Twits constantly plotting to either obtain or retain his peerless services. The threat of being banned from sampling his gastronomic delights is often the club wielded by Bertie's Aunt Dahlia when he displays his unwillingness to commit his assistance to her latest Zany Scheme.
  • In the N. K. Jemisin short story "L'Alchimista", Franca is an executive chef consigned to obscurity by a Noodle Incident in which she might have spat on a Prime Minister. When a Mysterious Stranger shows up with a sack of even more mysterious ingredients, Franca improvises a meal of impossibly delicious and literally magical food through experimentation and inference, which moves the ancient Alchemist to ask to become Franca's apprentice.
  • Legends & Lattes: Thimble, the rattkin baker who agrees to start working for the titular coffee shop in exchange for a living wage and free coffee, and because he feels that the menu needs expanding. The café's business really takes off when he starts adding his heavenly cinnamon rolls to the menu, and he invents biscotti, which they name "thimblets". Viv eventually gives him carte blanche in the way of funding—whatever ingredients he requests, she'll source for him, and she's very unhappy to lack the space for a double oven to make his job easier. When the shop is burnt down and rebuilt, they expand the kitchen.
  • Like Water for Chocolate has the elderly Nacha and the protagonist Tita, who learns from her. The recipes at the start of each chapter are mouthwatering, and then there's the Magic Realism where Tita's emotions are transferred into the food.
  • Nyanta of Log Horizon is one of the first characters to discover the secret of the cooking system in the new world. He is also famous for his curry, to the point where the whole guild celebrates the news that Nyanta's cooking curry for dinner.
  • Maoyu: The Little Sister Maid, despite being somewhere in the single-digits old, is a brilliant chef, with every meal she makes looking right out of a cookbook. She even invents orange soda (she calls it "orange water") by mixing (likely reduced) orange juice with water from a naturally carbonated spring.
  • In Lois McMaster Bujold's novel Memory, Miles Vorkosigan hires his gate guard's mother as a cook, based on the elaborate gourmet box lunch she prepares for her son. He's right, she's one of these. Suddenly he starts getting visitors at mealtime, and attempts by his relatives — including his parents — to hire her away. General opinion is that Ma Kosti could make a meal fit for the Emperor if her base ingredient was cardboard. The last is not an exaggeration. She does make a dish fit for the Emperor — literally, as it's served and beloved at the Emperor's wedding — when her base ingredient is nutrient paste produced in the guts of a genetically engineered cockroach.
  • Monster of the Year: Michael's mother claims she can cook like Betty Crocker, and it's not far from the truth. She doesn't like doing it more than once a month or so since she's so busy with keeping up the house and her business, but she can when she feels the need. (The rest of the time, unless Jeff or Michael cooks, they usually just get Chinese takeout.)
  • Arthur Dent in Mostly Harmless becomes a narrow version of this when he gets stranded on the planet Lamuella: he can only make sandwiches, but he learns to make them so well that he acquires almost priest-like status in the local community. If anything, he's even more respected than the local priest, precisely because he can make amazing sandwiches and the priest can't.
  • Nero Wolfe: The title character is an unabashed stay-at-home hedonist who keeps a supreme chef, Fritz Brenner, on staff to indulge his gourmet appetites. Nero himself is pretty good, when he decides to exert himself.
  • In Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas series, the odd one himself. Saying his pancakes suck functions as his Berserk Button.
  • In Mur Lafferty's novel Playing for Keeps one of the characters has a superpower that makes her a Supreme Chef. She intuitively knows what kind of food everyone around her likes and exactly how to prepare it.
  • Mihali from The Powder Mage Trilogy embodies this trope to the fullest. Anybody who has ever tried his cooking can attest that the man is nothing short of a god in the kitchen. Not only that, but he also seems to be capable of conjuring food seemingly out of thin air in large enough amounts to feed an entire city.
  • In the Prince Roger series, this trope lands on the titular prince's valet Kostas Matsugae. Stuck with the prince and his bodyguards on a Death World, he decides to pull his weight by taking over cooking, laundry, and similar domestic duties, and he's good at it. He routinely knocks together perfectly respectable stews from day-old T. rex-analogue and swamp water and can put together a multi-course feast when given some money and a market to spend it in. Of course, whenever he tries to share recipes with the locals, they all look at him like he's insane — the main ingredients of his meals come from ridiculously dangerous wildlife the prince and his men kill, which none of the natives ever considered treating like game animals.
  • In the Rainbow Magic series, food-based fairies are often these.
  • Friar Hugo in Redwall is renowned by the residents of Mossflower Wood for his cooking.
  • The Rising of the Shield Hero: The ignorant citizens/nobles of Melromarc can say what they want about the so-called "Devil of the Shield", but when it comes to his talent for cooking food, he's an absolute expert at it, far more than even the other local chefs in fact.
  • In The Saint's Magic Power Is Omnipotent, the protagonist Sei had an herbalism hobby in her earth life, and she applies that in the medieval fantasy world of Slantania by introducing the concept of using precious medicinal herbs to enhance the flavor of food. Not only is this massive jump up in the culinary arts of the world, but her cooking especially gives the users supernatural strength and enhancements to their physical capabilities.
  • The eponymous character of James White's The Galactic Gourmet ran out of professional challenges at the five-star restaurant he ran at a multispecies hotel and was feeling bored until a Kelgian diner personally thanked him for a good meal, having just been released from Sector General. This led to the Great Gurronsevas heading for the Final Frontier — hospital food. He became the Chief Dietician of Sector General. (Since he effectively became a head of department without going through the hospital's usual screening and training procedures, Hilarity Ensues.)
  • Slugfest: Mrs. Finnerty is the best baker any other character in the book has ever encountered, and is constantly making sweets for her students while being mindful of not giving them too much unhealthy food.
  • The Speed of Sound novel The Sound of Echoes has Lolo, a mentally disabled woman living in a run-down institution who happens to be a phenomenal chef. She started cooking out of necessity because she couldn't stand the food they served, and now cooks for most of the residents and staff. Skylar, McHenry, and Eddie all agree that her breakfast is the best they've ever tasted.
  • The Eternal Emperor of the Sten series is a spectacular chef. A major hobby of his is trying to recreate foods he remembers from his youth, thousands of years ago.
  • Asuna maxed out her cooking skill in Sword Art Online, which is pretty impressive on its own — nobody really bothers putting much effort into non-combat skills like that. The supreme part is that she experimented with different spices so much that she was able to figure out how the system synthesizes flavor and creates things that simply do not exist in the game, like soy sauce. One thing that makes this particularly funny is that at the beginning of the game when offered the knowledge of how to get cream for use as a condiment, she comments that she isn't in the game to eat good food. The "Extra Edition" OVA for the anime adaptation shows that her cooking skills extend to outside SAO, cooking lunch for her friends during their summer vacation.
  • Ryuuji Takasu of Toradora! has this as part and parcel of his Real Men Wear Pink suite of skills. In his case, due to being the main housekeeper for him and his mother for ten years, he just has a lot of experience. It gets Played for Laughs when his friends ask him to make a really spicy curry — he makes it well hotter than any of them can tolerate, but it's so danged good that they feel compelled to keep eating.
  • Mrs. Cormaci from The Underland Chronicles is apparently a very good chef.
  • In the Village Tales series, local gastro-hotelier Teddy "The Hipster Chef" Gates is one (Bocuse-trained, at that); but all he really wishes to do is be his own pâtissier. He considers the Duke of Taunton's cook, Mrs. Woolley, and the ducally-trained housekeeper at the Rectory, Rose James, to be his betters in the kitchen.
  • According to Sideways Arithmetic From Wayside School, Miss Mush can cook beautifully when she's only cooking for herself and/or a few others. Unfortunately, at Wayside, she's cooking for around three hundred, and in those quantities her food hits the other extreme.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In Arrow Oliver Queen himself thanks to being forced to survive on a hostile island is a pretty damn good cook, much to the envy of Felicity. This is ironic since comic book Green Arrow is a Lethal Chef.
  • The A-Team, "Cup 'A Joe": Despite B.A.'s complaints that Murdock is crazy and will poison the diners with his cooking, he turns out to be quite good at it. Face says that his crepes remind him of the kind one of his girlfriends used to make.
  • The titular Angel as remarked upon by Cordelia, is a surprisingly good cook for a blood-drinking vampire. Given Angel has lived well over 200 years he’s bound to have picked up some culinary skill at some point.
  • Babylon 5: Head of Security Michael Garibaldi is a very good cook besides being a top-notch cop and soldier. A subplot in Season 2 involves Garibaldi trying to get the ingredients for bagna càuda (basically Northern Italian fondue) behind Dr. Franklin's back (he was concerned for Garibaldi's heart health). "A Distant Star" has Franklin finally agreeing to try the dish as long as Garibaldi takes care of himself.
  • Gordon Gordon Wyatt in Bones retired from psychiatry to pursue a career as a professional chef, and the consensus is that he is quite brilliant. Just don't call him a "fry cook" (*ahem*).
  • Piper Halliwell from Charmed is an excellent cook and worked as a sous-chef. It's suggested that this was the primary reason that she was such a skilled potion-maker as well because the two skills complement each other.
  • CSI NY:
    • Resident coroner Sid Hammerback went to culinary school in France before becoming an ME. He's still quite good.
    • Mac's girlfriend Christine is a successful restaurant owner and chef. Her specialty is shrimp diablo, which she can whip up in no time. At one point, she also makes a dinner for herself and Mac which takes up a whole counter.
  • The deuteragonist of The Devil Judge is a skilled chef which is evident in Yo-han and Elijah's positive reactions to his cooking in episode 6.
  • Doc Martin: Martin himself. He might be uptight, a stick-in-the-mud, and unexpressive in every other aspect of his life, but his gastronomic creations show a singular passion and creativity. Notable that even during his relationship with Louisa he still insisted on doing the cooking for both of them. Though his obsessive commitment to health means that he only ever cooks fish and steamed vegetables.
  • Doctor Who: The Doctor appears to be a whiz in the kitchen, depending on the incarnation. In "The Lodger", he manages to assemble a satisfying enough omelette for two from some eggs, stray cheeses, and salad dressing. Seems that living as a bachelor for most of a thousand years makes you pick up a few things.
  • Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman: Grace, Robert E.'s wife, is an excellent cook, and her café is a great hit in Colorado Springs. Everybody praises her skills and enjoys her delicious food. Preston A. Lodge III hires her to cook in his hotel in later seasons.
  • Downton Abbey gives us a few:
    • Mrs Patmore, while not up on the fancy cooking of the Continent, is universally praised for the excellence of her traditional English stately-home cuisine.
    • Mrs Patmore's protégée Daisy also wins great praise, even garnering an invitation from Harold Levinson to be his personal cook in New York. She turns him down but lets her romantic rival Ivy (who learned the same techniques) take her place.
    • Alfred Nugent, the footman, learned a great deal about cooking in his prior career as a waiter at a restaurant (apparently in York). While at Downton, he single-handedly rescues a sauce accidentally ruined by being left on the fire too long, and revels in the rare opportunities he has to help the kitchen staff with cooking. However, he dreams of cooking in a high-class restaurant kitchen. He participates in a contest to be one of four new cooks to join the kitchen at the Hotel Ritz under the legendary Auguste Escoffier and his nearly-as-legendary deputy Arsène Avignon (the latter of whom actually appears). He seems to fail at first...but actually, he came in fifth, and one of the four who scored better than him dropped out, so he wins the appointment in the end.
  • Vincent in Eureka, to the point that the diner has no menu, and some residents consider it a challenge to order something he can't do. However, when left to his own devices, he can occasionally be a Lethal Chef, not because the food's bad but because it's experimental. He, like everyone else in town, has Mad Scientist tendencies and has a doctorate in molecular gastronomy.note 
  • Marie Barone from Everybody Loves Raymond is described as a spectacular Italian chef. It's the only leverage she has against her useless husband, and it is the source of a great deal of jokes at Debra's expense.
  • Monica Geller from Friends, who makes her living as a professional chef and offers a contrast with Lethal Chef Rachel.
  • The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air:
    • Grandma Hattie, Uncle Phil's mother, is consistently praised for her traditional southern cooking and is usually seen in the kitchen with her apron on when she visits the Banks family. She's able to whip up a delicious three-course meal for the whole family without breaking a sweat and she's even shown making her own biscuits and sauce, which everyone found divine. Humorously lampshaded by Will, who notes her culinary skills don't come as a surprise because both her husband Joe and her son Phil are Big Eaters (Joe is still quite trim though). Her food is so good that Will practically leapt into her arms in thanks just from the description of it.
    • Goeffrey the family butler is also regularly praised for his speed and efficiency with cooking, especially his diversity. He can whip up classic European cuisine, a delectable roast or even simple sandwiches, all of which the family adore. He's also a very skilled baker and Carlton goes crazy for his cookies.
    • All of the Smith sisters are praised by the family for their cooking and all are well known for their unique variations of delicious stuffing, though no one can decide exactly who's the best of the four. It becomes a humorous subplot in the Thanksgiving episode. Arguably, the prominent one could be Viola (Will's mother) because she taught her sisters how to cook as children.
  • Hot Pie in Game of Thrones. Cooking is his greatest — and perhaps only — talent. So rather than continue on with Arya, Gendry, and the Brotherhood, he chooses to stay at a quiet wayside inn and become the cook. In Season 7, it turns out he is still there and happy with his job. He is pretty much the only character so far in this notoriously grim series to bow out of the story in a content, non-violent manner.
  • Gilmore Girls:
    • Sookie. She's so obsessed with cooking that she catered her own wedding parties and was still putting icing on the cake on her wedding day. Even Emily Gilmore who is usually unable to be pleased adores Sookie's food and considers her extremely talented.
    • Luke. He has a diner and everyone in Stars Hollows loves his simple style of cooking.
  • Hannah Montana: Jackson's best friend Cooper secretly loves to bake, although he is embarrassed about it. He actually baked Miley's birthday cake which Jackson had to deliver after messing up the previous cakes.
  • Hannibal: Dr. Hannibal Lecter is a master cook and gourmand who only ever serves Michelin star-worthy haute cuisine to his house guests. His banquets are a high point of Baltimore's fine arts community. Unfortunately for them, he's also a Wicked Cultured cannibalistic Serial Killer who enjoys sneaking human meat into those fabulous meals.
  • LeBeau, the French member of the Hogan's Heroes team, is of course a good cook. The greatness comes in the fact that he can concoct excellent dinners and desserts with the materials available inside a POW camp, making him have almost MacGyver-esque cooking skills.
  • Horatio Hornblower: Steward James Doughty, Admiral Pellew's most excellent steward. Pellew "gives" him to Hornblower as a wedding present. Doughty's an excellent chef and very proud of his culinary skills. Sir Edward enjoyed having him around, but passes him to Hornblower with the words "thy need is greater than mine". Hornblower has simpler tastes than Pellew but appreciates having meals that are actually edible for once, and the fact that they are palatable is just a nice bonus. Unfortunately, this makes Styles who was Hornblower's previous steward of the Lethal Cook variety very jealous.
  • House: Dr. House becomes one of these when he briefly takes up cooking.
    House: I'm an addict. I take everything up to eleven.
  • Iron Chef revolves around the premise of having these kinds of chefs go against each other.
  • Kamen Rider:
    • Kamen Rider Agito's eponymous character, who is a great cook even with Laser-Guided Amnesia. He actually opens his own restaurant at the end of the series.
    • Kamen Rider Kabuto: The Ace Tendou is most well known for being an excellent cook. He managed to get his cooking skills from working at his grandmother's oden shop revealed in Kamen Rider Decade.
    • Kamen Rider Gaim gives us Pierre Alfonso Oren, A.K.A. Kamen Rider Bravo A.K.A. MISTER DANGEROUS. When he's not beating up on the other Riders for fun or hamming it up for the cameras, he's busy being a famous faux-French pastry chef. His dedication to his baked goods is so great that he even defied the local city-controlling (not quite so) evil corporation because their actions threatened to spoil a customer's enjoyment of his cake. Even without his Rider powers, if you insult his work, you will be hurt. A lot. Probably by a pan to the head.
    • Kamen Rider Zi-O: Junichiro Tokiwa’s cooking is so good, it even impresses Shouichi Tsugami .
  • King Silas in the intrigue alternate-world drama Kings insists on cooking for his family every morning, and misses the time in which he went to the supermarket and "fought for the best melon", and still he goes to the grocery himself and buys his ingredients, yet they clear the shop. Because he is the King. This makes him this trope's paradigm.
  • Despite the premise, Kitchen Nightmares actually features several of these. Usually, the problem is that they're being hamstrung by incompetent management. Charita/"Momma Cherri" is a standout example, as she managed to make food that Gordon Ramsay of all people declared delicious, but was less competent on the managerial side and needed Ramsay's tutelage to make her restaurant successful.
  • Lessons in Chemistry: Elizabeth is a great cook in part because she uses her chemistry expertise in the kitchen. She treats cooking like experiments, for example keeping extensive organic chemistry research notes as she tries to perfect melting cheese for lasagna.
  • Big Guy and Genius Bruiser Eliot Spencer on Leverage is an expert chef, to the point where owning his own restaurant is one of his main ambitions. He's also gone undercover as a Chef (at a cooking school) or Caterer (during which he possibly killed The Butcher of Kiev with an appetizer) on several occasions — and created the menu for the Bridgeport Pub in the fifth season, to what appears to be popular acclaim.
  • Reese from Malcolm in the Middle really knows how to cook, he even forces Hal to work for him by making Hal taste whatever he is cooking at the moment. He enjoys cooking so much that one of Lois' most effective punishments is to ban him from the kitchen.
  • The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House: It's discussed that being a makanai is more complex than it seems because the maiko are from all over Japan, and the recipes must satisfy everyone. Kiyo's cooking, however, is praised by everyone who eats it, and her food prep in each episode is framed as Food Porn.
  • M*A*S*H episode "Too Many Cooks". A soldier who was a gourmet chef in civilian life is wounded and ends up at the 4077th. He's such a superb cook that he can make Army food delicious.
  • Aldo Marino from the Midnight Caller episode "That's Amore" is such a great chef that an American mobster hired him after eating only one meal at the Sicilian restaurant where he worked.
  • Adam played by Adam Arkin from Northern Exposure, who though lived as a hostile, semi-mythical hermit, was a genius gourmet chef who could create amazing haute cuisine dishes, as revealed to the series protagonist Dr. Joel Fleishman in the Season 1 episode "The Aurora Borealis".
  • Odd Squad:
    • In "The Confalones", Otto explains to the chefs of the eponymous restaurant how he makes spaghetti sauce with meatballs when he's not thrust into battle against oddness. Since he's a Big Eater, it would make sense that he loves to cook as well.
    • As part of her status as The Ace and a Renaissance Agent, Oprah is implied to have good cooking skills in "Odd Squad Needs You" when the titular commercial that Otis puts together shows her with a custard fruit tart that she made in cooperation with a man who is presumed to be an Odd Squad client.
    • Speaking of Otis, the episode "Sir" has Olympia stating that Otis is a great cook, although it's never shown exactly how great he is.
    • In the second part of the Season 2 finale, "Odds and Ends", Oona pops up between Otis and Olympia with a "thumbs-up" cake to celebrate them repairing their friendship and also produces a "question mark" cake from her Hammerspace spine when asking how she, Otis, Oprah, and Olympia are going to find out the true culprit behind the villain break-ins. Seconds after that, Olympia questions Oona on her baking abilities, and the group decides to use the Scientist's baking skills to sneak Oprah and Otis into Headquarters by having her bake a three-layer vanilla-flavored cake big enough to hide both fired agents easily.
      Olympia: How big of a cake can you bake?
      Oona: Depends on the flavor.
      Olympia: Vanilla?
      Oona: Huge.
      (transition to Oona and Olympia wheeling a large cake into the elevator at HQ)
      Oprah: When you said huge... (opening a door in the front of the cake) You were right, Oona.
    • In "Orla's Birthday", Omar and Oswald manage to make a scorpion pie based on an old Odd Squad recipe. Future episodes would also show that Omar and Oswald are quite the skilled cooks, with Oswald teaching Orla how to make strudel in "Why Did the Chicken Cross the Dimension?" and Omar making crafts out of things like mashed potatoes (his castle in "Wax On Wax Odd") and nachos (his perfect plate of nachos in "It's Not Easy Being Chill").
  • The Sopranos has a number of these:
    • It should perhaps surprise nobody that Artie Bucco falls into this category. While his restaurant Vesuvio benefits from its Mafia connection (inasmuch as it's the restaurant of choice for the Jersey wiseguys), all indications are that the food is legitimately excellent. Artie's ideas for recipes all seem to be delicious based on their description, and he legitimately seems to take great pains to secure quality ingredients for the restaurant, up to and including growing his own tomatoes (which—fortunately for Italian American chefs—grow fantastically well in New Jersey).note 
    • The mob wives are all expected to be good cooks, but Carmela Soprano's cooking seems to be legendary in-universe. Father Intintola seems to lust after her ziti almost as much as her, and when Janice wants to impress her new husband Bobby Baccalieri and his kids, she steals Carmela's lasagna to pass it off as her own.
      Bobby Baccalieri: She made lasagna the other night—delicious. With sweet sausage along with the beef? I thought Karen's was good, but—
      Junior Soprano: Sweet sausage? In little pieces? And a layer of basil leaves right underneath the cheese?
      Bobby: That's right.
      Junior: That's Carmela's lasagna.
      Bobby: The fuck you talkin' about?
    • Among the other mob wives, the best cook appears to be Rosalie Aprile, who got very high praise for a complex meal in Season 3.
    • Jim "Johnny Cakes" Witowski is the chef-owner of a diner in New Hampshire and boasts that his house-made breakfast sausages are "addictive." Vito Spatafore certainly seems to agree.
  • Chef in Star Trek: Enterprise is He Who Must Not Be Seen, He Who Must Not Be Heard, and He Who Must Not Be Named, but not in the Speak of the Devil context. Yet, he is such an amazing Chef that hardly an episode plays without the main characters dropping his name, or rather his title, at least once and usually with fawning admiration. This makes him a sort of running gag in the same way the non-speaking Morn on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is said to be a chatterbox. In the one episode where we do see a cook, it's a holodeck and Riker is playing him.
  • In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, this seems to be encoded in the Sisko DNA. In a setting where nearly everyone relies on replicated food, Ben grows his own vegetables and can be seen cooking on a regular basis; the only time anyone seems less than enamoured with his food came about because he got curious about the potential of Ferengi tube grubs (and Jake only complained after finding out they were in the dish). He learned this from his father, who runs his own restaurant — and would have to be a damn good chef to stay in business in an era of food replicators. Jake, Ben's son, has also inherited the cooking gene.
  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Captain Pike cooks as a hobby and incorporates it into his leadership style, regularly inviting members of his crew to dine on his cuisine. He also woos women with food.
  • Super Sentai:
    • Umemori Genta/Shinken Gold from Samurai Sentai Shinkenger. Subverted in that only Juzo and Kotoha says his sushi is good, while everyone else thinks it's plain. His curry, on the other hand, plays it straight.
    • Both Don Dogoier / Gokai Green and Gai Ikari / Gokai Silver of Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger are both amazing cooks, but both of their cooking talents veer in different directions: Gai's cooking is for fun and enjoyment while Don's is tailor-made for everyone's well-being (the other Gokaigers, before he joined, weren't the healthiest of eaters). Don ends up depressed by Gai's accomplishments but ends up being bolstered when Gai admits that Don's cooking is much more better than his since he can't arrange it like he can.
  • Victor from That's So Raven is an amazing chef. He even opened his own restaurant, "The Chill Grill". In the spinoff Cory in the House, he is the chef of the White House.
  • Jack Tripper from Three's Company. Besides feeling bad for him for being homeless, it's part of why Janet and Chrissy want to keep him as a roommate in the first place.
  • Kwan from Thunderstone. His cooking is wonderful, and everybody who tries it is happy to tell him so. This makes things difficult when he leaves for a short time, as apparently everybody else he knows is a Lethal Chef.
  • Tomica Hero Rescue Fire once featured a Cook-off between Tama-chan and Chukaen. Tama won by making a delicious soup out of a fish head and the remains of a leek.
  • Treme is set in post-Katrina New Orleans so naturally this trope had to occur. Gourmet restauranteur Janette Desautel manages to pull off culinary miracle after miracle in conditions that are only a few steps up from After the End. In one episode she manages to wow a table full of chefs that dropped into her place at the last minute, making up a gourmet multi-course dinner for them on the fly.
  • Lola Rosales in The Young and the Restless. She's good enough to run her own food truck, with ambitions of opening a restaurant, and everyone who tries her food agrees it's the best Cuban food they've ever had.

    Roleplay 
  • Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues:
    • Ciro has great cooking skills as a result of having to take over household responsibilities at a young age (his mother having left and his father busy with work). He is somewhat limited in that living in poverty doesn't allow him a lot of ingredients to work with.
    • Much like Ciro, Marko has taught himself to cook as part of his overall self-reliant lifestyle. When he's first introduced, he's whipping up a delicious batch of cookies for his fellow gang members.
    • Mirielle is the daughter of a baking family and is shown to be both an excellent baker and chef. She entered Sebastian's house and whipped up a meal in record time for them all to enjoy.
  • In DC Nation, Fauna is such a good cook that she has catered two Titan weddings. Even Nightwing will not argue with her when it comes to feeding the horde.
  • Dino Attack RPG takes this to ridiculous levels with the Brickolinis, whose pizza is enjoyed almost universally to the point where an incident involving one person disliking it gained particular infamy.

    Tabletop Games 
  • The Food College of magic in GURPS can make you into this, especially once you can cast Essential Food, which creates good food in its purest elemental form. That might be cheating.
  • Magic: The Gathering:
    • Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar (good luck) spent seven years and seven days serving as the indentured chef of a powerful demon, under the decree that if she served a mediocre meal or, gods forbid, the same one twice, she'd be next on the menu. She not only succeeded, the demon offered her a full-time job afterwards. Her ingredients are unpleasant, with her ingredients including multiple sentient species, but apparently they can be delicious!
    • Gyome, the best chef of Witherbloom, the Strixhaven life sciences department. His signature cake is considered as good as, if not better than, passing your exams, and it's noted in his lore that the only complaint he's ever gotten is that his portions are too big.
    • Any legendary character with the Choose a Background mechanic from the Baldur's Gate set can be made one by making that Background Master Chef, which represents the quality of their cooking with a stat boost to every creature that you summon with both cards out. The most common pairings for this, per the Commander site EDHREC, are all from Baldur's Gate III, being Lae'zel (because her ability combos with it the best, meaning that every creature benefiting from the meal is getting bonus strength and durability equal to a full-grown bear), Volo (either because it puts him in the same colours as the other Volo card, letting them both be part of a deck, because his decks are very creature-focused, or both), and Shadowheart (who, given her creature sacrifice ability, is mostly just fattening them up for slaughter).
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!: Marauding Captain also works as a cook for the army, shown to be cooking what appears to be curry in the artwork of "Marinating Captain" with several other Warriors including Field Commander Rahz and General Freed waiting for the dish.

    Theatre 
  • In Come from Away, one of the stranded passengers keeps offering to help in the kitchen, and the local volunteers keep assuring him that his help is not needed—until he tells them he is a master chef at a worldwide hotel chain and pleads to help—at which point they are happy to let him. When he is able to leave, he asks the locals for their recipe for "fish with cheese".
  • Cyrano de Bergerac: Ragueneau has a successful bakery in Act II, with various assistants and apprentices, and in act I, he mentions he could prepare "Chicken a la Ragueneau". Everyone enjoys his pastries, but the problem is that would be not a great feat because the poets at Act II and the cadets at Act IV are starving when they do.

    Video Games 
  • Konomi is one in Aquapazza. Her Splash Art is even food-themed.
  • Battle Chef Brigade is basically this, except the chefs themselves are beyond just good that they fight monsters bigger than them to get ingredients.
  • Chest: Tole is a skilled chef who can tell what dish a person wants just by observing them. He states that he acquired this skill by working at various establishments.
  • In the online game City Girl Life, the Player Character has the "Chef Career" among her work options. If she chooses this path and follows it to the end, she will become this under the tutoring of the famous chef/restaurateur Gilden Moreno and his Number Two Claude.
  • Cooking Mama from the eponymous game series. She knows exactly how to make each dish and (usually) walks you through the process. If your dish is really good, people will stuff themselves.
  • Deadly Premonition has two: First, there's Thomas, whose excellent biscuits are in fact the best healing item in the game, and Nick, who built a diner off his talent. Nick's Vanity License Plate even reads "GR8COOK".
  • Killia from Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance is extremely good at making curry, so good that this was actually a major plot point in one chapter. Killia prepared curry for the Prinnies in the hub, it apparently was so delicious that when a thief stole the plate Killa made for them, the Prinnies were so riled up by this that they proactively began pursuit of the thief, something Christo quickly takes note of. If Killia's curry can motivate Prinnies, of all things, into action, then it has to be good. Sure enough, this made the cast demand curry from Killia, when the rest of the cast finally get to taste it, the curry turned out to be so good that it made Seraphina outright faint, and makes Christo almost ruin his Paper-Thin Disguise in delight.
  • Don't Starve character Warly, the Culinarian, begins play with a portable crock-pot and a chef's bag, allowing him to prepare and preserve more complex meals from the word "go". His character trailer depicts him cooking and serving a seafood stew so delicious it relieves his mother's dementia! However, being so skilled makes Warly a picky eater, which is not so good for wilderness survival.
  • Dragon Quest V: According to party chats, Sancho is an excellent cook, and everybody enjoys his meals.
  • In Dwarf Fortress, any dwarf can become one of these with practice. Prepared food has an inordinately high value, a legendary chef can turn raw tiger intestines and bear brains into a barrel full of gourmet meals with a value rivaling adamantine weaponry.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • One of the targets in the Dark Brotherhood questline in Skyrim is a legendary chef known only as "The Gourmet". Certain members state that his recipes indeed live up to their reputation and are actually somewhat disappointed that he's to be assassinated. He keeps his identity a secret with only the chef of Markarth knowing who he is: Turns out he's an Orc. The Player Character then needs to impersonate the chef, which can lead to some hilarious cooking results.
    • In the series lore, the best cooks in Tamriel are said to be the Bretons of High Rock. Given the race's propensity toward snarkiness and occasional Jerkassery, as well as medieval France making up part of their Culture Chop Suey, they can be the ES universe equivalent of a French Jerk. In the aforementioned Skyrim quest, if the Player Character is a Breton, another character will comment that the Gourmet being a Breton is "too obvious."
  • In Fallout: New Vegas, your character can become one and a Chef of Iron if he or she has high enough "Survival" skills. Being able to turn a rotten piece of meat from a mutated animal into a first-class gourmet dish, such as the Wasteland Omelet.The ingredients? As. Strangely enough, Cook-Cook of the Fiends is noted as a highly-skilled cooknote  despite being a drug-addled pyromaniacal rapist. Of course, one should be wary of his favorite ingredient...
    • Incidentally, a sufficiently skilled Courier can also make up a recipe that substitutes for human flesh.
  • Fallout 4 allows your character to cook a variety of meals at cooking stations using ingredients taken from various beasts in the wasteland. Not only do cooked foods have greater restorative properties and additional buffs than raw ingredients, but cooking also somehow removes radiation from the foods, making them safer to consume. The Nuka-World DLC also allows the player to become a Supreme Soda Jerk, with the Nuka-mixer station allowing the player to create their own sodas that, like cooked foods, heal more than standard Nuka-Cola flavors while also, somehow, remove radiation (if not outright curing radiation poisoning).
  • In Fantasy Life, becoming one of these is but one of the goals you can strive for. If you succeed, King Erik will jokingly admonish you for stealing his wife and daughter's hearts.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • In Final Fantasy VII, Tifa Lockhart is apparently a wonderful cook with AVALANCHE especially appreciating her cooking. Wedge even attributes his obesity due to how much he loves her meals. In the remake we learn her specialty is eggs, chips, and pizza.
    • Final Fantasy XIV has the Culinarian as a non-combat Disciple of the Hand crafting class which makes food that gives stat buffs as well as fishing bait. Many of the Class quests involved have the Warrior of Light become one of the best chefs across all of Eorzea, especially when some of the ingredients come from high-level monsters.
    • In Final Fantasy XV, Ignis serves as the party's chef, with a dedicated skill to cooking meals while camping out. So sharp are Ignis's culinary skills that not only can he replicate meals typically served at restaurants, but he can even bake cakes on a camping barbecue.
  • Several characters across the Fire Emblem series:
    • Patty in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, especially seen when she makes lunch for Seliph if she's his girlfriend.
    • Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade:
      • Lowen. A Justified Trope as his grandfather and his father worked as cooks for the Pheraean royal family, so he was taught by the best from an early age.
      • Rebecca, too. In her B support with Lowen, she actually makes him lunch to thank him for saving her at the beginning of the game. No wonder they can be paired up.
    • As is Oscar from Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, having learned from taking care of his little brothers Boyd and Rolf. He stopped being the Team Chef of the Greil Mercenaries to let Mist have a go, though Ike wasn't so keen on the idea. He offers to help Tanith with cooking in their POR support.
    • In Fire Emblem: Awakening, Noire's supports with Owain reveal that she's an excellent baker. Likewise, Gaius is very good at sweets. On the other hand, while the Avatar's usually more of a Lethal Chef, to the non-human members of the group this trope seems to be in effect; Panne adores his/her carrot stew, which everyone else hates.
    • In Fire Emblem Fates, the player can build a restaurant in their castle, in which a random one of the units will do the honors of preparing stat-boosting food for the army. While most of them are at least passable chefs (save for some truly terrible ones), some are so good at it that their cooking can even impact the other characters' stats positively. Some of these are Peri (cooking is her other hobby besides killing people, with her Missing Mom being a Supreme Chef too), Jakob (a Battle Butler who is good at everything save for his No Social Skills; the Avatar is a Big Eater with a Sweet Tooth so he constantly makes sweets for him/her), Mozu (a farmer's daughter who is also in charge of handling food in the army), Percy (who's absurdly lucky that anything he cooks is probably affected by it), Mitama (a shrine maiden raised in a temple who was probably taught by the priestesses there), Dwyer (another Battle Butler and Jakob's son who takes pride in his cooking and coffee/tea making), Asugi (obsessive Sweet Tooth who makes his own sweets as a hobby and an Expy of Gaius who's implied to be either his reincarnation or past self) and Caeldori (The Ace and quite the hard-worker).
    • In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, the player can invite a student or faculty member to prepare a meal at the monastery's dining hall, which confers stat bonuses for the remainder of the month. Some characters excel as chefs, and cooking with them confers additional stat boosts. Bernadetta is the only member of the Black Eagle house who is an accomplished cook, with a particular fondness for sweets and baked goods. The Blue Lions has three skilled chefs: Dedue (who is a dab hand at preparing dishes from his homeland of Duscur), Ashe (who worked in a restaurant before joining the Academy), and Mercedes (another confectioner). The Golden Deer, meanwhile, has Lysithea, who, like Mercedes and Bernadetta, enjoys making sweets. The staff members have Manuela, who is said to be as talented at cooking as Hannamen is at cleaning. Finally, the Ashen Wolves have Yuri, as Ingrid is amazed at how delicious Yuri's food can be despite initially learning how to cook to survive.
  • Galaxy Angel: Whenever the Angel Wing organizes a picnic, Milfeulle is the one who takes care of most of the cooking, which is loved by everyone. In fact, on her route in Moonlit Lovers her cakes have become legendary, to the point Chitose is very excited over the prospect of eating one when she re-enlists.
  • God of War Ragnarök: Odin, of all people, is apparently a really good cook; several people compliment the stew he made disguised as Tyr. Apparently, his quest to learn the secrets of the universe also includes Ultimate Culinary Knowledge.
  • A surprising number of the cast of Granblue Fantasy are these. Some are even Chefs of Iron. Special mention goes to the entire Lumiel Order where everyone (except Charlotta whom we have yet to see cook) is really good at cooking, with one of them who can even stop wars with his dishes.
  • Eurydice from Hades provides Zagreus with her home cooking if met in Asphodel, which is good enough to power up Zagreus' godly gifts all on their own. If given divine Nectar as a gift, she says outright she uses it as an ingredient.
  • KanColle: Yamato likes to serve her "famous" meals to the Admiral, and Iowa at one point compliments her cooking. This trait is actually true to history; the real Yamato had, among other amenities, cooks recruited from restaurants.
  • Kingdom of Loathing:
    • Jarlsberg the Chef-Magus was apparently capable of crafting the perfect ingredients from raw magical energies and then preparing them into the platonic ideal of whatever food-stuff he desired, from the perfect plain bagel to the ultimate ice-cream sundae. Playing the Avatar of Jarlsberg special ascension path lets you tap into that cooking ability (which is good, as Jarlsberg was apparently a picky eater, and one of the limitations of the path is you can only consume food and booze prepared in Jarlsberg's Cosmic Kitchen). Amusingly, although his food preparation was divine, his bartending skills can only be described as "okay" if you grade on a curve.
    • Some of the absolute best food and drink to be gotten in the entire Kingdom can be found in the food court of the Hobopolis clan dungeon. Especially noteworthy are the hobo/hippy who manages Suddenly, Salad!, who somehow makes the eponymous dish taste good, and the jovial Arthur Finn, whose World Record Homebrew Stout is described as "like drinking a loaf of bread."
  • In Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, Bowser reluctantly admits that Fawful's cooking is amazing.
  • In Mitsumete Knight, Gene happens to be excellent at cooking, and her specialty, the gateau, is supremely delicious.
  • Monster Hunter:
    • The Felyne Kitchen always knows how to cook up an epic meal for any monster hunter going on a hunt, and it does it with style.
    • Monster Hunter: World has the "Meowscular Chef", a Palico who heads the Canteen in Astera with their crew of Palico chefs. Every dish is lavishly crafted for Hunters, who gain stat boosts from the meals prepared.
  • In Ninja Pizza Girl, Gemma's dad is this. Tristan considers the hypothetical choice between enjoying his dad's pizza and being able to afford to wear pants to be a tough one. Gemma is astonished when a customer is capable of looking sad even though she's got one of her dad's meatball pizzas right in front of her. Even the Big Bad admits that his company could not have created a better pizza "in a million years." The man's pretty good at baking pizza, is what we're saying.
  • Panty Shot from One Way Heroics is revealed in the ending to be a surprisingly great cook for a mercenary. When your character asks why he became a mercenary instead of a chef, he replies that he once tried to open a restaurant, but it failed since no one wanted to buy a product named "Fresh Panty Lunchbox". Fortunately, later on, he opens another restaurant which fares much better.
  • Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan: One of the missions is to turn a struggling ramen chef into this.
  • Tayce T. in Paper Mario is considered the best chef in the Mushroom Kingdom, bar none. She is often invited to Peach's castle to help prepare the feasts and food, and her cooking is so legendary that a single bite of her cake sent one of Bowser's henchmen into a euphoric burst of energy, dropping a key item for Mario.
  • Chef Shimi, the resident cook of the Excess Express train, in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door says this of himself. Not that anybody disagrees. Interestingly, the recipes he lists sound borderline Cordon Bleugh Chef, but are actually delicious. One guest on the train even stole Chef Shimi's whole stew pot and took it back to his room to eat by himself, eventually licking it clean!
    • As Zess T. is Tayce T.'s grumpier sister, her dishes have nearly the same amount of careful preparation as to be expected from a good chef. She just forgot to add the love.
  • Super Paper Mario has Saffron from Flipside and her counterpart from Flopside Dyllis. Saffron is a Nice Girl who cooks delicious meals if the heroes bring her one ingredient, whereas Dyllis requires two ingredients and she is far grumpier than Saffron. Both are still equally talented chefs though.
  • Persona:
    • The main character of Persona 4 is implied to be an excellent chef, especially for his age. He apparently makes most of the food at home, and can (if the player knows a little about cooking) make some very good school lunches to share with friends. One social link (Yukiko's) involves helping the character get better at cooking (though she refuses to be directly tutored if you offer). That said, he's only a supreme chef if the player makes the right choices, as making the wrong ones turn him into a Lethal Chef; thankfully, the truly horrible blunders just give bait for fishing.
    • Shinjiro Aragaki in Persona 3 proves capable of cooking restaurant-quality dishes (while lecturing Fuuka at the same time). With a little prompting from the female protagonist in the PSP remake, he makes a lavish dinner for the team, with every dish described as looking like a picture out of a cookbook and tasting delicious. The female protagonist herself is an excellent cook, specializing in sweets that can be given as gifts — Mitsuru, presented with one such creation, praises the PC's skills as being worthy of a first-class patisserie. She can even remedy some of Fuuka's cooking blunders!
    • Sojiro of Persona 5 might be a bit of a One Note Chef, but his curry is AMAZINGLY delicious — although this seems to be at least partially down to the "perfect recipe" formulated by Futaba's mother, Wakaba. (Apparently, he was pretty good before getting it, too, though.) Spend time with him, deepening your connection to the Hierophant Arcana, and he'll teach it to you — turning Joker into one too. The Curries you can cook with this ability are THE best MP-regenerating items in the game. Under Sojiro's tutelage, Joker can also become an excellent coffee brewer.
    • In Persona 5 Strikers, Joker's cooking skills are taken to near superhuman levels. He's put in charge of cooking for the Phantom Thieves while they're on vacation, and it turns out that he can replicate the signature dish of a gourmet restaurant just by eating it once. While using the tiny kitchen of an old RV!
  • Pikmin 2: Pikmin 2 introduces Louie, a Gourmand who can make even the most ferocious lifeforms of PNF-404 into a delicious gourmet meal.
  • Princess Maker:
  • Potion Permit:
  • Resident Evil Village: The Duke plays this role in addition to being the game's merchant. If Ethan provides him with the necessary ingredients, the Duke can whip up meals so delicious that they provide permanent stat boosts. It also overlaps with Chubby Chef, as the Duke is fat to the point where his clothes fail to contain his girth.
  • In Roots of Pacha, Tare and her son Nokk are the resident chefs of the village. Their cooking is loved by the villagers, and Era enjoys her cooking lessons from them.
  • Sengoku Rance has a few: Oda Nobunaga (dango), Kikkawa Kiku (general cuisine), and Imagawa Yoshimoto (imagawayaki).
  • Gaichû from Shadowrun Returns Hong Kong is, among other things, an excellent chef, able to make incredibly appetizing sashimi from commonly available ingredients with only minimal cooking and relatively light application of spices. As he is a ghoul, those "commonly available ingredients" are meta-humans, while the minimal cooking and light spices are to ensure it still technically counts as "raw meta-human meat", the only thing ghouls are able to eat. It's still impressive that he's able to make a conventionally appetizing meal for such... Unconventional dietary requirements, though. The Player Character can even (unwittingly) eat a slice during his introductory mission and the taste is described as good if slightly salty.
  • The Sims: Those who max out their cooking skill can cheat death with food or give long-lasting emotes. Several premade Sims and NPCs in the series have high or maxed-out cooking skills at the start of the game:
    • The Sims 2 premade Julien Cooke is said to be a remarkably talented chef In-Universe, as indicated by his bio.
    • Also in The Sims 2, dishes made from fresh-caught fish will take on a sparkly appearance and replenish a Sim's Hunger motive much faster than normal.
  • In Star Ocean: The Second Story, while all main characters can become Supreme Chefs thanks to the Skill System, Chisato, Rena, and Yarma are those who canonically apply.
    • In Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, you have Sophia whose Skill level in cooking is 43, she can even work on a budget and in a hurry as her Cost and Time modifiers might show. Nel is about as handy in the kitchen as she is with a blade and Mirage isn't half bad either.
      • As for NPCs you can recruit, you have Rigel, Mayu, The Killer Chef and Damda Mooda. Mayu and Damda might raise doubts about their skill level, but canonically speaking they're still exceptional chefs. The Killer Chef is said to also cross into Chef of Iron territory, and he doesn't really understand the difference between cooking and killing, hence the name. Either way, he has the highest cooking skill in the game and one of the best time modifiers in his category.
  • Story of Seasons:
  • Sunless Sea: The Bandaged Poissonier, who can take a sea monster no one in their right mind would even dare touch and turn it into the most delicious dish you could ever find in the Neath, and will gladly accompany you in your ocean travels in search of new ingredients. That, and he's had some terrible luck finding someone worthy of his skills: He served European royalty until he got stuck in the Neath, then the Traitor Empress employed him until the Royals' appetites changed for the worse, and he had a nasty falling out with the Khan after he sent back a dish. Notably, he's a Tomb-colonist, who most people wouldn't really like near their meals (mostly because they keep falling apart and you don't want a piece of the chef in your soup), though one can only assume the years of experience help.
  • Elzam from Super Robot Wars: Original Generation fits this trope as well, as he's an excellent commander as well as an excellent chef. The first thing he does when transferred to a new post is cook up a gourmet meal for all the soldiers stationed there. He's also able to survive Kusuha's "energy drinks" without fainting and identify all the ingredients used based on the taste. His Paper-Thin Disguise is even named Ratsel Feinschmecker, which means "mystery gourmet".
  • In Survivor: Fire, while the gran lets her brownies burn, they are known for being pretty good when not burnt.
  • The Tales Series uses cooking as a way to heal after battles are over. Inevitably, there will be both a Supreme Chef and a Lethal Chef among the party members at some point.
    • In Tales of Destiny 2, everyone loves Nanaly's cooking, even picky eater Judas.
    • In Tales of Symphonia, Genis has a reputation as a Supreme Chef in Iselia and has several scenes in the beginning of the game with characters praising his cooking. Though considering his older sister Raine is a Lethal Chef extraordinaire, it's almost a necessity for him. Genis is not the altogether best chef in the game, however: That would be Regal, who earns the special title "God of the Kitchen" in a late-game sidequest.
      • An interesting twist on this trope and One Note Chef is that all the characters (save Raine and Presea) have themes to the recipes they are best at, even outperforming the Supreme Chefs of the party with certain recipes. Lloyd is better at foods with meat in them, Colette is good with desserts and recipes where a major component is fruit, and Sheena excels with Asian-themed foods like Udon Noodles. Even Genis and Regal have their specific wheelhouses where they outperform the other. Genis works best with everyday recipes like omelets, and Regal has the highest skill with the most complex recipes.
      • In the sequel Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, Emil reveals himself to be a Supreme Chef in skits, though in the actual cooking mini-game, he lags behind Regal and Genis, the previous game's Supreme Chefs. He also shows a penchant for preparation, cutting fruit and vegetables into animal shapes and such. In Ratatosk Mode, he has zero care for preparation, and Tenebrae compares the visuals to Marta's cooking... but to his and Marta's surprise, the taste is just as supreme as ever.
    • For Tales of the Abyss; in the short time you have him, Asch is shown to be a great chef via skit, in contrast to Natalia and Luke who are his fiance and replica, respectively, both of whom are no good in a kitchen.
      • Otherwise your recommended chef is Anise, she is the character who can create better than normal recipes and can gain a title that makes it impossible to ruin dishes.
    • Tales of Vesperia has their protagonist Yuri Lowell. When he says his secret ingredient was "love", Hilarity Ensues. Of course, it turns out he didn't really do anything special; he just follows the recipes to the letter.
    • Ludger from Tales of Xillia 2. Not surprising, considering that his job is being an actual chef. Everyone praises his cooking, and nobody minds him using tomatoes in practically everything he cooks (except for Elle, who gets over it). The developers put a lot of effort into making his dishes look delicious.
    • Velvet from Tales of Berseria manages to be a supreme chef despite losing her sense of taste at the end of the tutorial zone. She had the cooking skills already and compensates for the loss by having other members of the party taste-test for her.
  • Tekken:
    • Jun Kazama, if she wasn’t wonderful enough, her delicious cooking can unite Heihachi, Kazuya, Jin, and Lars in one ending in Tekken 6.
    • Marshall Law and his son Forest Law own a successful restaurant which they are just as passionate over as fighting.
    • Out of all the characters in the franchise, it is confirmed that Anna Williams is in fact, the best at cooking.
  • In World Neverland: Daily Life in Elnea Kingdom, Wiala, the owner of the local tavern, is this. Not only is she an excellent chef, many of her quests involve her teaching you some of her secret recipes so you can become an excellent chef as well.
  • The World of Warcraft expansion Mists of Pandaria allows the player to expand on his/her cooking skills by going down a number of cooking paths: Grill(Strength), Oven(Stamina), Pot(Intellect), Steamer(Spirit), Wok(Agility) and Brew(Could be considered the Lethal Chef path). Also, if you are under-leveled in cooking, you have the option to level your cooking through the trainer and the ingredients she provides (though you do need Golden Carp, which isn't provided by her)
  • Xenoblade Chronicles:
    • In Xenoblade Chronicles X, Lin is the best chef in BLADE. Whenever she cooks a meal, other BLADE members have a tendency to arrive "coincidentally" and enjoy a dish.
    • Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has Pyra, whose special skill revolves around cooking. The Torna prequel DLC reveals that Jin, of all people, is also an excellent cook.
    • Xenoblade Chronicles 3 keeps up the series tradition starting in X with Manana, who takes great pride in the food that she makes. The other characters often compliment her on her cooking.

    Visual Novels 
  • Ace Attorney has several although rarely as a plot point.
    • Iris is shown to be one in a roundabout way. In first case of the third game Phoenix praises his girlfriend's homemade lunches. Said girlfriend is later revealed to be Iris.
    • In the backstory of the second Investigations game, Jeff Masters organises a pastry contest between four supreme chefs: himself, Dane Gustavia, Delicia Scones, and Isaac Dover. Last two are subversions. Delicia is actually a pharmacist and Dover is a sculptor. Both got into the contest by cheating.
    • Manfred von Karma's wife apparently has cooking skills rivaling professional cooks.
  • Elcia from Area X bakes cookies for King Orzea, a man who has spent years obsessed with cookies, that are so good, he bursts into tears and decides to throw a party to celebrate. Elcia, who is looking for a "Silver Bangle"note  isn't happy about the outcome.
  • Yanagi in Collar × Malice is noted by many characters in all routes to be an amazing cook. It's brought up especially in his route where Ichika can't help but repeatedly gush over the omelette rice he made for her.
  • Teruteru Hanamura from Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is a culinary arts master, and has this as his Ultimate talent. His exact title is "Ultimate Cook" but prefers to be called a "Chef" instead of "Cook" because it sounds more sophisticated. Prior to the game's events, he makes a promise to his mother (who is ill and a Workaholic) that he would take over his family's restaurant so he can establish himself as a great chef once he graduates.
  • Dream Daddy:
    • Robert impresses Craig and the Dadsona with his cooking for his first dinner with them. It helps that he used to work as a sous chef in Spain.
    • Craig himself is a very good cook, to the Dadsona's surprise. He manages to perfectly prepare steaks, roasted potatoes, and a salad while out camping. Even his fitness smoothies are delicious.
    • Joseph turns out to be excellent at grilling, to the point that the other dads make punny compliments to him during the cookout in Chapter 1.
  • Shirou Emiya of Fate/stay night, in a bit of an inverse of many other male protagonist-heroine pairs, cooks so well to the degree that the Let's Play commentators are more turned on by Food Porn than the sex scenes, much to the fortune of Saber's Hyperactive Metabolism. Much of which ties into his tutoring Sakura as a cook ... who he admits is probably better than him now. Then Rin gets her competitive streak fired up. Their cooking talents can be better seen in Today's Menu for the Emiya Family.
    • Especially notable as each of the three has a specialty they are generally considered unrivaled at. Shirou specializes in Japanese food as the protagonist, highlighting his fondness for traditional things, like his classical Japanese-style house, the ancient Japanese art of archery, and swords. Sakura specializes in Western food but often tries Japanese food to appeal to Shirou, highlighting the Matou family's Western-style house and diminishing magic from leaving their native lands and insisting on staying in a foreign land that did not suit them. Rin specializes in Chinese food, which at first seems weird as she also lives in a Western-style house and has nothing obviously Chinese about her or her magic/interests, but cleverly foreshadows that she was trained in Chinese martial arts by Kotomine.
    • Of course, Shirou’s cooking ability extends to Emiya, his older, more cynical, Servant-ified self from an alternate timeline, as well. There’s a reason why many a Fate/Grand Order fanfic and fancomic treat him as the Chaldea’s resident chef.
    • In Fate/hollow ataraxia, it is briefly mentioned that Gilgamesh is the only person who knows how to cook hydra meat, which is incredibly toxic, and turn it into a meal.
    • In Fate/EXTRA, the special bento box prepared by Sakura is the only thing the school store will accept in exchange for a giant ruby that Rin wants (even if the player somehow gets all the money it's priced at). The description says that it takes all of the player's restraint not to eat the masterpiece bento themself, despite knowing how much the ruby is needed. Sakura's regular bento are the best healing item in the game, restoring all health and clearing all status effects. There is no Shirou in this game, so Sakura has taken the "supreme chef" role completely.
    • In Fate/Grand Order, Boudica is an expert on traditional Britannian cooking, which despite the common bad reputation of British cooking is apparently really good, and tries to teach some to Mash before getting distracted by her. During the Valentine's events, several female Servants admit to going to Boudica for help with their chocolates, which suggests her skill extends to foreign foods as well.
    • Kiyohime's profile in Grand Order states that she is also an excellent chef, but it's overshadowed by her behavioral issues.
    • Beni-enma pulls off the impressive feat of being an expert chef without a tongue (she's based on the fairy tale of the Tongue-Cut Sparrow). She takes cooking very seriously; Kiyohime was one of her old students, and the experience left her utterly terrified of Beni-enma.
  • In Hatoful Boyfriend, pursuing a relationship with Dr. Shuu results in him sending the player character a lovely roast for Christmas dinner. Shuu later reveals that he murdered Yuuya, and asks how he tasted. Ho ho ho ho ho.
  • Toyed with in Katawa Shoujo, which presents the whole range:
    • Hisao Nakai, the protagonist, can find his way around a kitchen because his parents were always away at work and he had to make his own food.
    • Hanako Ikezawa is a pretty good chef... but according to Lilly, she becomes dangerous if she starts experimenting.
    • Lilly Satou herself is an interesting case of VN heroine (especially since she's a deconstruction of the "Perfect Lady" archetype) who's specifically described as a fairly good cook, but not an excellent one — she has a lot of experience and likes to cook for herself and her friends but she admits that there are some things a blind cook just can't do (or at least would take far too much effort to learn how to than they're worth).
    • The real Supreme Chef of the game is, surprisingly enough, Genki Girl athlete Emi Ibarazaki (who appears to have inherited her mother Meiko's talent) — but she's also a health and fitness nut, so don't expect too many deep-fried pork dishes or desserts. It's made clear that, realistically enough, Emi doesn't "hate tasty things" or somesuch — she actually understands how and how much people need to eat and cooks accordingly.
    • Shizune Hakamichi, meanwhile, is as close as a very realistic game gets to a Lethal Chef (surprising, given that she's generally extremely talented at whatever else she does) — she doesn't even seem to understand the theory behind the food she cooks. Could be explained by the fact that she's filthy rich and may not have had to ever do much cooking herself. (She's seen freely ordering take-out at some point.)
  • Khenbish from Minotaur Hotel makes amazing food for anyone who has the pleasure of having a taste of his food, and if he's the hotel cook, his food can even give buffs to various guests should you decide to help him cook for the day.
  • In Shall We Date?: Ninja Shadow, one of Saori's friends is a young woman named Haru. She has her own restaurant and, according to Saori and the Vigilantes (especially Ukyo), her skill in the kitchen is near unrivaled.
  • Because he's a Minor Living Alone, Akira from Spirit Hunter: NG has taught himself how to cook. The quality of his cooking is commended, and he bonds with Ami while teaching her how to cook.
  • Saki Nijino in Tokimeki Memorial 1: her bentô (lunch boxes) are so delicious, they are, according to Bromantic Foil Yoshio, one of the most valuable items among guys at Kirameki High; plus, she plans to hone her skills at a culinary institute once she graduates.
    • And in Tokimeki Memorial 2, while she's not as skilled as Saki, there's Kaori who happens to be one once you get to know her more.
    • TokiMemo Girl's Side also has a Supreme Chef; this time it's Madoka Kijyo, who explains away his excellent cooking skills as being the result of living on his own.
    • Girls Side 2 has Teru, The Ace, who works at a cafe and gives the heroine delicious homemade cookies for White Day if he likes her enough.
  • In True Love Junai Monogatari, Remi Himekawa turns out to be an excellent chef. If she and the MC have a date, she gets there late... because she has made a excellent bento box for him, as thanks for taking her out. If he rescues her from a kidnapper, she will offer to cook for him as thanks — but they can end up having Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex instead.
  • Unlike her Lethal Chef sister Hisui, Kohaku from Tsukihime is a spectacular cook. When she isn't purposely drugging the food to make people go insane. Well, even then it tastes fantastic.
  • Umineko: When They Cry:
    • Magical Gohda Chef. Ronove as well. In The Stakes' Valentine's Day, Gohda is so impressed when Beelzebub gives him some of Ronove's chocolate that he immediately leaves for Belgium to train to be a better cook.
    • Gohda shouldn't be left out either. There's a reason Beelzebub gave him the chocolate and it wasn't out of love; she wanted something good in return on White Day.

    Webcomics 
  • Blood Stain has Serge who can whip up amazing dishes. That said, he can't make a decent pot of coffee if his life depended on it.
  • Dont Look It Sucks has Mandew, who can cook food so well, that it often takes on magical properties and can even come to life. One of the secondary characters is born this way.
  • Girl Genius has a spark who specializes in making pies that alter people's moods when thrown at them.
  • Jamie in Leftover Soup can turn Rice Crispies back into rice.
    • Turns out he just used the rice filling from a hackey sack instead.
  • In The Order of the Stick, the Token Evil Teammate Belkar is an astoundingly good chef. He's got skill points and feats based around cooking (he's a ranger/barbarian), and at one point he convinces a recurring (sort of) villain to let him and Haley leave with Roy (Well, his corpse, anyway) by cooking vulture stew which he made using a demon roach to supply the heat. note  Being who he is, he also threatens to cook people into his dishes, and even offers the Oracle the dish of his own lungs on a plate. When Gannji says that his friend Enor is going to eat Roy's heart, Belkar suggests sautéing it in garlic first. His culinary skills are also used to track Vaarsuvius when they're sent to the Semi-Elemental Plane of Ranch Dressing.
  • Schlock Mercenary: Ch'vorthq zig-zags it; he's apparently a genius in terms of actual cooking, balancing spices and tastes, and what to serve. The problem is that he really loves that whisk arm of his, and overapplies it in every damn plate, constantly and proudly. The result is a mush that feels mostly like eating something that's already been in someone's stomach and where everything tastes the exact same. Liz's contribution to the mess hall is simply to serve the plates before he can apply the "whisk of ruin" to them, and when that happens everyone loves the results. Unfortunately, no one had bothered telling him to his face to lay off the damn whisk, and when this happened he felt so insulted about never being told that everyone got to remember he had once been genetically engineered to be a biological explosive when he lost control of his fuse and nearly blew up. He's back on track (or treads on a robot body, as the case may be) after that incident, and fully applies for the trope now that he's getting proper feedback.
    MAXIM 7: If the food is good enough the grunts will stop complaining about the incoming fire.
  • Step Monster: Roy Willscott is not only good at cooking food in large quantities — handy, given Matilda's appetite — but also quite a skilled cook as well, seeing as how Matilda is quick to sing the praises of his efforts at cooking her favorite meals.
  • Widdershins: Hotel Gula's kitchen is manned with supreme chefs. This is because it is controlled by a spirit of gluttony that magically abducts the best chefs that ever entered it to cook for a never-ending banquet. So, among others, there are bartenders from the twenties, a side dish chef from the fifties, and a patissier from 2013.

    Web Original 
  • Shishihara: Sota can cook pretty much everything due to his passion for feminine things.
  • Post-Top Gear James May is making a YouTube career out of making things like Shepherd's Pie. Oh, and he once beat Gordon Ramsay in a cook-off.
  • Whateley Universe:
    • The three head chefs at Superhero School Whateley Academy. Phase should know. He grew up in a family so rich they kept two supreme chefs as their routine cooks, and as a result, he has a palate that is amazingly sophisticated for a fourteen-year-old.
      • Some of the students count as well, such as Mezzo and Roulette.
    • It's mentioned that there are Gadgeteers and even Devisors who specialize in cuisine — hopefully not of the Lethal Chef variety, though you never know. The superhero team Freelancers employ one in their clubhouse (which shares space with a hospital specializing in mutant-related problems), so presumably he, at least, doesn't get too carried away with it.

    Web Video 
  • The Victorian Way: Mrs Crocombe is a chef who works for Lord and Lady Braybrooke. She's an excellent cook and very proud of her culinary art. In the series, she presents her favourite recipes. Gorgeous, glorious Food Porn ensues, Victorian style.
  • Life of Boris: Boris may be a self-styled gopnik with the social graces of a sledgehammer, but damn if the man can't turn out tasty food. This includes making some fairly complex things like kulebyaka, black bread, and doctor's sausage from scratch, making a cheesecake from an American recipe without converting the units or knowing what a graham cracker is and still ending up with a palatable result, and, at one point, recreating a cake he had only sampled in a dream.

    Western Animation 
  • Adventure Time: Jake the dog is shown to be a great cook. He often makes bacon pancakes and is very creative in his plating.
  • Amphibia: Anne Boonchuy, having practically grown up in her parents' restaurant; in one episode, she transforms the local dump of a greasy spoon into a popular Thai fusion restaurant; and in another, Hop-Pop declares, after one bite of one of her omelets, that everything he's eaten up until that point has been garbage.
  • Aqua Teen Hunger Force: While Shake is usually incapable of doing anything, he has been shown to be really good at cooking, making four-cheese lasagna, cheese-injected fried beef, and funnel cakes. Downplayed, since Shake will cook only for 'special occasions' like screwing up Meatwad's diet or torturing Carl.
  • Bob's Burgers:
    • Bob Belcher is a wizard in the kitchen, particularly when it comes to burgers, and goes out of his way to create a new burger of the day each day. He's so good that a dine and dasher hit his restaurant three times because he loved the food.
    • Zeke (yes THAT Zeke) is a budding culinary artist, as Bob found out when he was subbing for Home Ec. The students at Wagstaff much preferred his meals over that of the cafeteria, and he quickly became a problem for CafeCo Food Services.
  • Care Bears (1980s): Grams Bear is a wiz with baked goods, so much so that her pie was able to turn a temporarily corrupted Tenderheart back to his normally nice self.
  • Digit from Cyberchase is a talented chef, and even had a cookbook published. He's so good, he knows how to reinflate a collapsed souffle.
  • Dexter's Laboratory has Dexter's mom, for whom it was revealed that the reason Dexter's dad married her was because of the muffins she makes. Apparently they are so good that he spends a whole episode descending into madness trying to steal the muffins instead of waiting for them to cool.
  • Futurama:
    • In an episode, Lethal Chef (among other things!) Bender seeks out one of these to improve his skills. As it turns out, the Supreme Chef in question has a secret ingredient which turns out to be ordinary tap water. Yes, ordinary tap water...spiked with LSD.
    • The alien celebrity chef Elzar is this, being famous for his amazing skill at cooking. Of course, he's also an egotistical Jerkass.
  • Garfield and Friends: Mamma Manicotti works in her own Italian Restaurant and not even her rival Papa Plastique manages to duplicate her recipe.
  • The Garfield Show: Vito Cappelletti runs a pizza parlor that the cast frequents, and his food is widely regarded as some of the best in town, even getting the approval of a popular food critic.
  • G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero: Apart from being one of the biggest, toughest guys on the G.I. Joe team, Roadblock is also a gourmet chef, and several episodes give him the chance to show his skills off.
  • He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: Prince Adam knows his way around a kitchen and even has his own specialty in spiced bread. This may have been intended to help offset him from his super-powered alter ego.
  • Hey Arnold!: One shot character Inga is shown to be talented in this domain. Although Helga expects Big Bob to disapprove of her foreign cooking, he quite enjoys it. She also prepares other meals and makes cake for Helga's friend at the park.
  • Kamp Koral: In "The Taste of Defeat", Narlene's food is actually incredible, in contrast to Plankton's. Even Plankton, who hates Narlene, admits that the food actually is great when he steals some for himself.
  • Canonically, Ron Stoppable from Kim Possible is a pretty good chef, especially compared to borderline Lethal Chef Kim. Fanon of course exaggerates both.
    • Dr. Drakken doesn't like to flaunt it for obvious reasons, but he's a very talented baker (his cupcakes in particular are shown to be delicious).
  • The Loud House: Lynn Sr is this, to the point he cooks all of the family's meals and eventually opens his own restaurant.
    • Linclon's friend Clyde McBride turns out to be an excellent pasty chef.
  • In Maggie and the Ferocious Beast, Hamilton is an excellent cook, especially when using pumpkins.
  • Miraculous Ladybug: Marinette's parents Tom and Sabine run a bakery, and their wares are universally beloved among the cast. They're well-regarded enough to be hired to cater a major movie premiere. Her uncle Wang is a world-famous chef whose signature Celestial Soup is described as "legendary".
  • Mr. Benn: In "Cook", a cook's attire led Mr. Benn to a palace whose princess refused all manner of foodstuffs. He got the idea to set things right by inviting all the poor children he saw before entering the palace to the feast in the palace, which finally persuaded the princess to eat.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • Even though she's not stated outright to be this, Pinkie Pie works as a baker/candy maker and is pretty great at it.
    • Also from the series in question: Cup and Carrot Cake, Gustave le Grand, Mulia Mild, and Donut Joe.
    • In 28 Pranks Later, Rainbow Dash makes a couple cakes for a prank (It Makes Sense in Context), and Sweetie Belle enjoys them.
    • Applejack takes great pride in her cooking and it's generally well-received, though it seems to be limited to apple-related dishes.
  • Gwumpki from Quack Pack. His food is still delicious even though it may be bizarre.
  • In Disney's Recess, Vince LaSalle's such a great cook that he fed the entire school (Student and staff alike) with his dishes. He was even invited to study abroad in a cooking school in France but stayed behind.
  • In many variations of Scooby-Doo, Shaggy and Scooby are portrayed as brilliant cooks who can whip up piles of delicious food in seconds, though Shaggy is the more qualified one and the one most likely to be in the kitchen. In fact, their food is shown to be so good that whenever they distract the villains with food, said villain will stop and eat it even though they clearly shouldn't. Justified, since the two are both iconic Big Eaters who are extremely passionate about food and would obviously want to know how to make it themselves if they couldn't find or buy it.
  • The Simpsons have had several:
    • Marge Simpson, while usually a fairly standard cook, briefly turns into one after she has the family kitchen renovated. On the other hand, it's suggested she's actually pretty good at her core competencies — it's just that she very rarely likes to try new things. For instance, when looking at a spice rack, she thought there were duplicates because there were more than seven different spices, and doesn't know what oregano is.
    • One-shot character Michael, the son of mobster Fat Tony, turns out to be an incredible chef, wanting to become a professional chef rather than following in his father's criminal footsteps. He's able to throw together a great salad with weeds he picked together in the school playground. He is, however, not above using his cooking skills to poison the enemies of his father after they gunned him down.
  • The Smurfs: Greedy Smurf can cook almost as well as he can eat, and seeing as that's his job, it's a good thing that he fits this Trope.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants:
    • SpongeBob SquarePants is the ultimate fry cook, even beating Neptune himself in a cook-off on one occasion.
    • Though Jim, the Krusty Krab's previous fry cook is the Always Someone Better. Jim admits that SpongeBob is a pretty good fry cook — but he'll only become a great one once he works up the nerve to get away from the Krusty Krab and Mr. Krabs.
    • Although Squidward Tentacles is horrible at cooking fast food, he is shown to be good at baking desserts in select episodes.
  • Supernoobs: Memnock, an alien warrior, is shown to be a very good cook. One episode had him cook an egg dish with coriander as an important ingredient and he often stayed up all night to try to perfect the dish. his ally and roommate, Zenblock yelled at Mem for his obsessive cooking, which angered him and made him move out but after they reconciled, Zenblock tried out the meal himself and found it to be very delicious.
  • Total Drama:
    • DJ is an excellent chef and loves to cook. He actually has a special spice from his mother that can make anything taste good, even Chef Hatchet's disgusting food. He also cooks the contestants' food during his temporary alliance with Chef in Action. When he confesses and eliminates himself out of guilt, his friends are very sad that they will miss his cooking and beg him to stay, even suggesting eliminating Chef instead.
    • Bridgette is either a very good cook or has some astonishing beginner's luck. In two straight episodes of Island, she teams up with DJ to cook up a spaghetti dish that Chris rates 15 out of 10 and then manages to prepare a plate of fugu sashimi and serve it to Geoff without killing him.
    • Julia's shown to be a very skilled baker which helps her to win the baking challenge. Makes sense that she used to work at her parent's bakery when she was younger.
  • Voltron: Legendary Defender: Hunk may be The Big Guy of the team but is also a great chef, especially when he improves the Vrepit Sal restaurant in "Space Mall" after originally being held as a dishwashing prisoner for unable to pay for the food he ate and thought they were free samples.
  • We Bare Bears: Ice Bear is not only a master chef but also the only one who cooks around the house...er, cave.

 
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Sanji

When challenged by G-8's kitchen staff to prepare 100 meals, Sanji waits until they have taken their turn. Afterwards, he proceeds to cook 100 meals out of the waste parts the staff left behind, espousing his culinary knowledge, and then quoting the teachings of his mentor, Red Leg Zeff. The watching Marines are quick to dive right in and voice their approval.

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