Playing With / Lethal Chef

Basic Trope: A character has poor cooking skills, often to comical extremes.

• Straight: Everything Julia tries to cook tastes bad.
• Exaggerated:
  • Julia's cooking is bad enough to use as a weapon!
  • Everyone pukes and runs screaming from the house when it's announced that Julia will be cooking dinner tonight.
  • Julia's cooking has a body count (and an investigation by the police, the District Attorney, or the Center for Disease Control) associated with it.
  • Julia's cooking becomes animate and attacks people. Not only that, every dish Julia makes becomes a horrible, decaying predatory monster overflowing with disease with a symbiotic relationship with maggots and rats, which spreads huge mega-overdoses of AIDS, H1N1 influenza, Ebola, gonorrhea, radiation poisoning, Zika, Spanish Flu, bubonic plague, malaria (ad nauseam) and mild sneezing to those unfortunate enough to consume it, killing them upon the first bite.
  • Julia's food contains completely inedible items as ingredients.
  • Julia is the reigning champion of a cooking competition to see who can set off a smoke alarm the quickest.
  • Julia's cooking is so bad that everyone living and undead, no matter their taste in food, aren't gonna have a bite on her meals.
• Downplayed:
  • Julia is a fair to average chef. She sucks sometimes, but can also turn out some good dishes.
  • Julia burns stuff in the kitchen all the time, but she can make a decent meal sometimes.
  • Julia is a One-Note Cook. She can cook one dish with no problem, but any attempt to cook anything else will end badly.
  • Julia can cook simple dishes just fine but anything more complicated quickly ends up as an inedible disaster.
• Justified:
  • Julia thinks she's a good cook, but isn't.
  • Julia isn't old enough to understand the basics of cooking.
  • Julia is dyslexic, so she has a hard time reading and comprehending the recipes.
  • Julia is a stoner and/or Cloud Cuckoolander and comes up with her culinary experiments while high or in one of her "wacky" moods.
  • Julia was never taught how to cook at any point in her life, and had to make do with what she gleaned from television and watching others, which ping-pongs between "Not bad, for someone who's never done it in her life" to "Very bad, even for someone who's never done it in her life".
  • Julia is an alien from another planet (or a Funny Foreigner from another country) where the standards of what's tasty and what isn't are unusual at best or very warped at worst.
  • Julia is an experimental chef and like most experiments, things usually turn out badly.
  • Julia is too headstrong and impulsive to bother about simple things like following the instructions or even common sense (even kindergarten-age kids know that they should wash their hands before manipulating food).
  • Julia is very easily angered and loathes being criticised in any form. Not only does this mean food is prepared sloppily and aggressively, so much as pointing out she didn't cook very well is met with angry yells and knife brandishing, so people are too scared to point out how bad she is.
  • Julia is preparing a food that is poisonous if handled improperly, and doesn't have the necessary training.
• Inverted: Julia is a Supreme Chef.
• Subverted:
  • We hear Julia is a horrible chef, but her food is okay.
  • Julia's food looks and smells absolutely disgusting. However, if someone gave it a chance, they'd notice that it tastes absolutely divine.
  • There is a body count associated with Julia's cooking, but the deaths are due to diseases from severe unbalances in nutrition values. If anything, the taste is actually quite good.
  • Julia takes a cooking class, and her cooking skills improve as a result.
  • There was one occasion when Julia's food tasted appalling. However, that was because the only available ingredients were so bad, even award-winning chef Monsieur Le Bien could not make anything decent either.
  • Julia is just pretending she doesn't know she's cooking something absolutely horrible; she intends it as an extremely mean prank, if not an outright murder attempt, on whoever takes the first bite.
  • Julia's dishes always come out horrible the first time. However, as she practices and fixes her mistakes, they eventually climb in taste to anywhere from "not bad" to "it's a party in my mouth".
• Double Subverted:
  • She ordered take out that time.
  • The food tastes good but it still gets people sick.
  • Julia's skills have improved on paper, unfortunately she still has a particularly nasty habit of working in the kitchen while angry that results in her deliberately or accidentally ruining her dishes.
  • Julia's learning curve unfortunately is still pretty damned slow, especially with dishes she personally does not like, meaning there is an average minimum of one year in which eating her new dishes is a Russian roulette with a ticket to the hospital for a stomach pump as the "prize" and major discomfort otherwise.
  • The "severe unbalances to nutrition values" are always inevitably her fault, though. As good as it tastes in the end, modern medical standards frown at how much salt she adds.
  • When Julia has access to good vittles, her food is still on the low grade of "meh" at best.
  • Julia unfortunately has the bad habit of making such "pranks" willy nilly, to the point either her cooking skills have atrophied or nobody believes she has them at all, which leads back to her continuing to do said prank dishes.
• Parodied:
  • Julia's culinary "experiments" have caught the attention of the Center for Disease Control and after her latest attempt at dinner, the CDC come in and quarantine her kitchen.
    Julia: Oh, No... Not Again!
  • When Julia pours herself a bowl of cereal, one of two things happen, the bowl somehow shatters itself or the cereal catches on fire, whichever comes first.
  • Julia attempts to boil water, she somehow manages to burn it.
  • Julia's horrid attempt at cooking comes right after she disparages Alice's own attempts at cooking as tasting like garbage.
• Zig Zagged:
  • Julia's cooking ability depends on what ingredients she has in her house. When she has enough money for groceries, she makes great food; when money's tight, it's time to break out the Tums and the airline barfbags.
  • Julia sucks at cooking actual dishes (appetizers and main courses), but is a whiz at baking and pastries.
• Averted:
  • Julia is too lazy to cook and has never tried.
  • Julia's cooking isn't terrible, but it's not Cordon Bleu quality either.
• Enforced: "What better way to paint Julia as a ditzy Cloudcuckoolander than to have her completely unable to cook? Brilliant!"
• Lampshaded:
  • "Is it even POSSIBLE for chilled tomato soup to DISSOLVE THE FLIPPIN' BOWL unless it's made by Julia?"
  • "Either someone's using the Necronomicon as a cookbook, or Julia's in the kitchen again."
• Invoked: A chef teaches Julia to cook in the most wrong ways possible.
• Exploited: The hero finds out that Emperor Evulz needs a new chef. They have Julia apply for the job so she can assassinate the Emperor with her cooking not-skills.
• Defied:
  • Realizing Julia doesn't know the first thing about cooking, her friends ban her from the kitchen.
  • Julia knows her cooking sucks and tries to get help for it (or says, "Fuck it!" and orders take-out food).
  • "I'm placing you in a cooking training program, in which you will remain until you get nothing but A-plus results in your assignments. If you refuse to take it, I have a collection of new implements that I have been eagerly looking forward to field-test."
• Discussed:
  • "Hey, Laika! Dinner at Julia's tonight! Don't forget the first aid kit, fire extinguisher and silver bullets!"
  • "Julia… I don't want to be rude. Heaven help me, I don't want to be rude. But I don't think I'll be able to express what I think of you making borscht with chocolate, Carolina Reaper, Death Wish Coffee grounds and pineapple without using certain choice words regarding your mental faculties."
• Conversed: "Why is it that there's always one character in these ensemble sitcoms who can't even put ice cream in a bowl without setting fire to the kitchen?"
• Implied: The main characters take turns cooking for each other, but (as an observant viewer would notice) Julia never gets a turn.
• Deconstructed:
  • Julia's inability to cook makes it hard for people to take her seriously as a useful member of the household.
  • Julia starts a fire with one of her cooking disasters.
  • Parodied #1 if one were to play it seriously (or comedic in a dark, gross way)
  • Julia is literal lethal chef. Her atrocious cooking ends up claiming the lives of a lot of innocent, unsuspecting people.
  • If Julia is a Funny Foreigner or an alien, her friends may develop a taste for her exotic dishes.
  • Julia is cooking for an army out in the middle of nowhere, or her impoverished family. Naturally, she has just wasted precious resources and put everyone at closer risk of starving.
  • That meal Julia just ruined was their last bit of food.
  • Thanks to her horrible cooking skills, Julia's food inevitably makes people ill. As a result, people despise her as they think she's trying to poison them.
• Reconstructed:
  • The rest of the family doesn't mind, since their taste buds are so shot, they'll eat anything.
  • The fire is put out quickly, so nobody gets hurt.
  • Julia encourages her friends to try new foods (i.e. her cooking), but they don't.
• Played For Laughs:
  • The characters tell jokes about Julia's cooking, and Julia is okay with this.
  • Everyone in town is Driven to Suicide over Julia's cooking.
  • Julia is a Giftedly Bad bistro owner who can't understand why her business is failing. Then Dan convinces her to try her own cooking, which results in her making horrible faces while insisting that she's enjoying it.
  • Julia pours a bowl of corn flakes and milk, It sets in fire.
• Played For Drama:
  • Julia's lifelong dream is to become a great chef, but her inherently terrible skills and inability to improve make it hard for her to succeed.
  • Julia's cooking causes a fatal case of food poisoning and she vows never to set foot in a kitchen again.
  • "Justified #3" (the "Julia is dyslexic" excuse) and "Justified #5" (the "Julia grew up with no one to teach her how to cook") if done as a Very Special Episode of a TV show.
  • In the final episode of the show, Julia starts a fire in the kitchen. The fire burns the whole town down, and everyone dies.
  • One of the victims of Julia's cooking completely snaps and irreparably tears her a new one, either mentally or physically. What they have done to Julia may end up going way too far to be considered karmic, but they just spent at least one night (and half a million dollars' worth of HMO insurance) in the hospital, so Julia's friends can't really say they don't understand.
• Played For Horror: Julia is personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people in the worst case of mass food poisoning in the history of the country and we get to see the suffering of all of them in all of its exquisite, Body Horror-inducing detail.

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Back to Lethal Chef, before she makes you actually eat it!

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