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Ranma: Soup, Akane. How did you manage to burn soup ? You'd better hope the EPA never finds out about you... Akane: You could have at least tried it! Ranma: Tried it? It was on fire! The bowl was melting! And I didn't like the look of that portal the fumes were forming... Akane: It was only a tiny portal. And the chanting wasn't that ominous... Ranma: Damnit, Akane, good cooking isn't supposed to break the laws of reality! — from the Ranma 1/2 fanfic "The Nameless Sequel" by Mike Loader
Her cooking is not just bad, it's inedible, and sometimes actually poisonous. Or it might have bizarre magical side-effects. Or explode. Or it comes to life and either attacks or tries to run away. Animals will stare at it and back away. The character — usually female — may well love to cook, but she's never actually bothered to learn, or she's learned from aliens, or her taste buds are wired wrong, or she just doesn't look to see what she's grabbing when it comes time to throw in another ingredient. The results are often dangerous to the poor sap who has to eat it so as not to hurt her feelings. It seems especially forced when they avoid tasting their own food. Curiously, this is a very popular trope used in anime.
A Lethal Chef sometimes has one or two things she can cook well — or at least edibly — but she usually prefers to experiment. Often she is unaware — either through the kindness of friends or determined self-imposed ignorance — that her food is inedible, in which case she is also Giftedly Bad. Occasionally the Lethal Chef can be taught to cook well - usually by a Yamato Nadeshiko type character, generally a sister, the mother or the best friend.
Particularly lively when the cook is trying to win someone Through His Stomach.
This trope is almost always used for comedy, though there are exceptions. Two dishes the Lethal Chef favors are the Fire Breathing Diner and Oven Logic, with a Gargle Blaster to wash it down.
In recent years, a milder form of this trope has emerged. Typically, the Less-Than-Lethal Chef cooks food that looks absolutely disgusting - but tastes fine.
A related trope, Cordon Bleugh Chef differs in that the chef in question is able to cook perfectly well but takes experimenting with food combinations that more often than not, really should NEVER be combined.
An Evil Chef is a Lethal Chef who does this on purpose, purely so he laugh maniacally as he watches his victims' stomachs commit suicide. A Chef Of Iron is a chef who knows how to serve out lethality with a dose of Martial Arts And Crafts, but knows how to make things other than poisonous cooking too.
Contrast Supreme Chef, Feminine Women Can Cook. Can lead to It Tastes Like Feet. Heaven help you if your Team Chef qualifies as this.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Kirie's cooking in Girls Bravo causes local pervert Fukuyama to Waterfall Puke.
- Lum in Urusei Yatsura. There's nothing technically wrong with her cooking, it's just that she tends to overuse the spices to make it taste like the food on her home planet. One dish is "Tabasco soup, Indian Style, with horseradish marinated chili cod roe and hot pepper pickled eggplant stewed in chili sauce". Humans who eat it usually wind up drinking several glasses of water.
- Though at one point in the Manga at least, Lum's attempts at cooking on Earth open a portal in the Moroboshi kitchen, from which miniature space fleets erupt and begin to do battle. And there's that time in the OVAs where Ataru is turned into a werewolf by her food.
- Asuna from the Mahou Sensei Negima anime. In one episode, she bakes a cake for a teacher she has a crush on. Said cake not only has green frosting and uses a tentacle, several eyes, and a lobster claw as ingredients, but actually screams whenever on screen and bleeds when cut into. (Fortunately, it was only her "practice" cake, and the second one she cooks — and which she really intends to serve — is bakery-perfect.)
- Aoba in Cross Game
- Akane Tendo in Ranma 1/2. Starts out horrible and slowly learns how to cook non-lethally (but still very bad tasting) from her Yamato Nadeshiko older sister Kasumi over the course of the manga. Ranma fanfic, however, has created a body of fanon that attributes far more outrageous results to her efforts — as seen in the quote above.
- Shortly into the last third of the manga series, Akane is capable of cooking a decent, tasty curry, which sends the entire family into shock. However, later in that same story, she unwittingly uses a magical water that is capable of healing all wounds, and makes her soup incredibly delicious. She puts her faith in this water, so when it runs out, her rice cakes are once again potent enough to knock out a grown man.
- In the anime, at least, Akane actually straddles the border between this and Cordon Bleugh Chef; while she does get distracted, not pay attention to what ingredients she's using, and generally acts much like a Lethal Chef, she doesn't help her case by the fact she often actually intends to make her own "unique" concoctions when she's cooking, ignoring the real recipe for one of her own devising.
- And never bothers to taste her own cooking, having somehow never realized chefs are supposed to do this.
- Actually, she is aware that chefs are supposed to do this, being told several times. She just refuses to do so, thinking she doesn't need to, and even gets offended if people ask if she has tasted her latest dish.
- Fanfic exaggerations of Akane's kitchen incompetence can be wonderful sources of comedy. "It wasn't trying to molest you! It was just being friendly, OKAY?!"
- In at least the OAV adaptation of a manga story, Kasumi relates her own mishaps trying to learn how to cook from her mother. She was still better then Akane, as her mishaps included merely poorly-shaped pot stickers and
overboiling the water setting a pot of water on fire. And the fact she was in the area of six years old at the time gives her more of an excuse then Akane and her issues.
- C-ko Kotobuki in Project A Ko; the Card Game Ani-Mayhem even used it along with Akane's Cooking as minor disaster which, if combined in play, were nearly irremovable.
- Sora Hasegawa in Ah My Goddess. Taught by Belldandy
- Kaoru Kamiya in Rurouni Kenshin. By her own admission.
'Kaoru (to Kenshin, after eating some rice balls he made): Those taste bad... but you know, you're a better cook than me.
- Pacifica Casull, the titular Scrapped Princess, aka "The Poison that will Destroy the World" ... but not in fact by her dreadful cooking (her foster brother actually teases her about this ...)
- Sanzenin Nagi in Hayate The Combat Butler. One of her attempts would probably have turned out pretty well... had she not confused detergent for flavoring oil.
- Not to mention that even attempts at making a cup of tea usually destroy the whole kitchen.
- Anthy Himemiya in Revolutionary Girl Utena produces magically dangerous meals (her curry causes people to switch bodies in a classic Freaky Friday — though arguably that was intentional), but quickly learns not to cook whenever there is an alternative available to her. She can safely produce shaved ice with fruit toppings, and limits herself to that.
- The various women pursuing Akito in Martian Successor Nadesico vie to impress him through cooking; this is doubly ironic, as not only are they all borderline lethal chefs, but Akito himself is a restaurant quality cook. The first time they tried to cook for him, the head chef on the Nadesico quarantined the kitchen as a biohazard for a while afterwards.
- In the episode after this, Ryoko wises up and serves Akito some of his own cooking. He deems it "pretty good" before she points out that he's the one who just cooked it.
- Likewise Misato Katsuragi of Evangelion (one of its occasional uses of comedy staples as a counterpoint to its main plot, which is one of the bleakest and darkest things ever animated).
- How bad is it? In Girlfriend of Steel Rei, the stoic, heroic death seeker, isn't game enough to try it until she's seen that it's okay.
- Tasting it results in a Pastel Chalked Freeze Frame played for laughs.
- Maburaho contains an episode where Rin's "cooking" is forced down to make her feel better.
- Ai Yori Aoshi had two lethal chefs, both of whom took lessons from the female lead Aoi (another example of the Yamato Nadeshiko teaching them, though only one actually improved.) Taeko, in particular, had the double disadvantage of being clumsy and considering things like strawberry curry and chocolate-covered tomatoes to be delicious.
- Inverted by Tina, who produces an unpalatable-looking mess that Taeko reluctantly discovers tastes quite good.
Taeko: Noooo! I like my stomach just the way it is!
Tina: Accept your fate! Eat my food!
- Orihime Inoue on Bleach. Here, it's not strictly speaking that she's a bad cook, but that her perspective on what tastes good is apparently absolutely alien to human experience. So much that the only two who like her cooking are not human: a Shinigami lieutenant (Rangiku Matsumoto) and one of Urahara's assistants (Tessai).
- Millenium Fera Nocturne aka Milly on Lost Universe is a variant on this: she's a great cook, but always causes a massive explosion in the kitchen whenever she prepares a meal, much to the consternation of the more Yamato Nadeshiko Canal (who, being a Spaceship Girl, is also less than happy about having a part of her body blow up every time Milly wants to make a pie).
- Subverted in the second season of Saiyuki: Sanzo's companions encounter a woman whose cooking is so notoriously bad, her meat buns are used as ammunition to fight demons. Cho Hakkai steps into the teacher role, only to see her "improved" cooking (apparently) just as lethal as ever... until the man she loves tries it anyway as a show of devotion, and finds it perfectly likeable. (Turns out, she had a rare gift to create, essentially, holy cooking — so even her good cooking is lethal to demons, which happens to include both Cho and his friend Sha Gojyo.)
- Xellos of The Slayers notoriously lost a Cooking Duel by using his amazing culinary techniques to produce a stew so unpalatable as to cause its component vegetables to writhe and scream in agony. Then again, that was exactly as he intended — he was under the impression that in any sort of "duel", the point is to kill the other person.
- Variation: Ren, in a cooking contest in DearS, causes humans' eyes to bleed with her cooking... but the other DearS love it.
- Hisui from Tsukihime cooks so badly it's considered poison if anyone but her eats it.
- For various reasons (Ciel being the exception), none of the characters can seem to bring themselves to tell Hisui just how bad her cooking is, even if she suspects it herself (it stems from her not having a sense of taste recognizable on a human scale).
- Luchs in Saber Marionette J continues to consider gunpowder a staple ingredient (although Panther pioneered the technique), despite the Amusing Injuries that regularly result.
- Not to mention Lime, whose cooking regularly yields a charred thing that bounces around on the plate.
- In the Cooking Duel in Mai-HiME, none of the three teams succeeds in producing an edible cake, resulting in the judges being hospitalized. Mai's team comes closest (because Mai herself is actually a competent cook), but Shiho ruins it by getting too excited and smashing her face into the cake before it's given away for tasting.
- Arika in the (subverted) Beach Episode in Mai-Otome. Upon seeing her food, Shiho initially gives it zero points, but after Arika tricks her into tasting it (with disastrous results), the rating is dropped to -10 (negative ten) points.
- The titular character of Video Girl Ai, Ai Amano, is designed to be an excellent cook... but her faulty incarnation, among its many other defects, is incapable of producing edible food. Still, Youta eats it out of affection for her.
- Usagi and Minako are both terrible cooks in Sailor Moon, though in one case, Usagi does manage to produce a curry that looks horrid but tastes really good- to a literal starving artist at any rate. (she later makes some cookies which have the opposite attributes). In the anime at least, Rei can't cook, but has the sense to limit herself to instant curry.
- Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid features Lieutenant-Commander Andrei Kalinin and his special borscht (an eastern-european beet soup) - a recipe made by his late wife that he has spent years of experimentation to successfully replicate, including on-the-second stirring, pH sampling, and adding such outlandish components as cocoa powder and miso paste. Said borscht is sufficiently gruesome to scare away even intractable stoic Sousuke, which was the whole point - Kalinin's wife was rather vindictive of his prioritizing his career over her. Kalinin himself, however, is completely oblivious to this and finds it delicious.
- And Sousuke himelf is shown to be a rather Lethal Chef (at least in the manga). Most of it stems from his lack of common sense, which results in him cooking rice in a rice cooker... over a fire. Indoors. Which causes the others to faint from the fumes. And in the end, he misinterprets Kaname's "a pinch of salt" as being a whole handful of salt.
- Hinako in Myself;Yourself is a textbook case of this.
- Kana in Minami-ke. Cream stew, anyone?
- To the extent that Kana can use her being required to cook as a threat. She did spend an entire episode trying to get better in Okawari, though taste testers Touma and Mako-chan got very well acquainted with the bathroom in the process.
- Miaka Yuuki in Fushigi Yuugi. She becomes better halfway through the second arc of the manga, but before she does, Taka lies about it to her. And she never tastes it.
- In the manga of Fruits Basket, Kazuma Sohma (Kyo's adoptive father, and a rare male example) is extremely inept at cooking, though not through lack of effort (he even has trouble making tea). This had the side effect of making Kyo a halfway-decent cook; he had to learn just to survive.
- Yuki is also strongly implied to be a Lethal Chef, and Shigure not much better (which, among other things, led to the two of them living on takeout food in the time before Tohru, a quite better cook, moved in).
- Bianchi from Katekyo Hitman Reborn! Her cooking is so horrendous that, as a professional assassin, it's literally her Weapon Of Choice. In fact, it is referred to as an explicit superpower - anything she cooks turns into lethal poison, regardless of any other factor.
- Not to mention they are almost always purple with bugs and smoke coming out and special variations can melt doorknobs. Spinning her pizza dough can cut people around her.
- Ironically, Bianchi's cooking is actually incredibly good, when she uses a delayed action poison even Yamamoto's father, a professional sushi chef, is impressed. She makes everything poisonous on purpose.
- According to the manga and Sound Stages of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, the other Wolkenritter wouldn't even dare touch Shamal's cooking unless Hayate declares it safe.
- The cooking of Ryou in Clannad made a piglet keel over after one bite.
- Meanwhile, Sanae and bread makes for an... interesting mix. Is it even possible for bread to glow in such ominous colors? Just don't say it in front of her or she'll run off around the city crying.
- What I want to know is how she made one batch of bread transparent.
- By making it so bad, even the LIGHT didn't wanna touch it. Duh.
- Although Ayu in Kanon is a terrible baker at first, the joke isn't used very often at all, and she's not often remembered for being a Lethal Chef. She's quickly instructed in decent baking by the Hot Shounen Mom Akiko in the absence of any real Yamato Nadeshiko character.
- Yuuichi is in fact entirely baffled as to how Ayu managed to burn rice and turn eggs into what seem to be solid lumps of charcoal. The cookies were so inedible that he couldn't even eat them to be polite as his teeth couldn't break them!
- Don't eat Akiko's 'special' jam though. Just... Don't.
- Akiko's Jam made a special appearance in Clannad After Story, where it was used in a combo with Sanae's bread. The resulting concoction was absolutely devastating, to say the least.
- Otae Shimura from Gintama can only cook tamagoyaki, but it's so inedible that it actually gives Gintoki and Kondou amnesia at one point when she feeds it to them, and is reputed to be the cause of her brother's bad eyesight. And yet, she never seems to understand just how lethal it is and continues to serve it no matter what.
- Variation in The Prince Of Tennis. Genius Bruiser Sadaharu Inui uses his horrible juices as a punishment for his teammates when they fail in training. These juices are so bad that everyone in the team (except for Shusuke Fuji, the local Extreme Omnivore) is actually terrified of receiving juice punishment.
- Made even worse in the bowling special, where the regulars (along with Coach Ryuzaki, Horio, Katsuo, and Kachiro) form two-person teams for a contest. The losing team has to drink a pitcher of Inui Special Recovery Juice "Aozu" which supposedly is mostly vinegar. Anyone who gets a gutterball has to drink a shotglass. Half a shotglass was enough to knock Fuji unconscious! Cue shock from everyone else and the understatement of the century: "Aozu is terrifying!"
- The Genre Savvy Inui also seems to be cognizant of how bad his drinks taste, as when he realizes he's losing, he decides to intentionally throw a gutterball to drink a shot rather than the pitcher. The shot causes Inui to mumble "I overdid it," and pass out. Oishi puts it best when he says "Don't make something you can't drink yourself."
- To top it all off, the prize for the winning team? Inui specially-made Nutritional Strengthening Juice "Akazu". Nobody escapes the power of Inui Juice.
- In Card Captor Sakura, Chinese Girl Li Meiling is amazing at cooking Chinese dishes but hopeless at Western bakery - so much that her inability to bake a cake becomes a running gag.
- Also subverted with Sakura herself. Touya talks about her cooking as if she were a Lethal Chef, but several characters with working taste buds enjoy her cooking.
- This Troper always saw that as just an older brother teasing his little sister.
- Nozomi of Yes! Precure 5 has this among her impressive number of failings. It seems to be contagious, as when all the girls try to cook together they have a tendency to mainly just produce chaos (and rice you should probably avoid), even though Urara at least can cook perfectly well on her own.
- In Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Nia's cooking looks delicious— however, it is horrendous enough to knock Rossiu out of commission for the entire episode. And, since Nia is Sparkly Princess Jesus, nobody can refuse her food. Amazingly, Simon and Boota are the only two able to eat her food without bad effects.
- obviously, the rest of the cast simply didn't have enough SPIRAL POWER that causes Nia's food to taste good.
- In Da Capo, Junichi's sister, Nemu, is considered to be a lethal chef, at least for the first season. However, Nemu's cooking was so bad that Junichi even calls her a "Murderous Chef" behind her back.
- In Kaleido Star, Rosetta Passel is not only a Lethal Chef, but is quite incompetent in anything related to housework for quite a while. At the same time, Layla Hamilton seems to have difficulty brewing coffee even with a machine, relying on her maid's advice and even then screwing it up. And also, Julie complains that her best friend Charlotte is too fond of using salt on everything.
- Cecile Croomy of Code Geass sort of qualifies; her cooking isn't lethal so much as a crime against the culinary arts due to her experimenting and mixing various ingredients. Some such examples include onigiri (riceballs) with blueberry jam in the center and sandwiches with ginger, sugar, and wasabi added for flavoring. Apparently, nobody has the heart to tell her the truth...
- In a scene of R2 that had Lelouch, Milly, Shirley and Rivalz trying their hand at cooking and baking, Shirley managed to spill the contents of a whole bowl of cake mix on herself by beating the mix too vigorously.
- Hatsumi (Eve) of Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito is known in her home economics class and beyond for her lethal pancakes. They look perfect, but the taste...of course, her love-struck adoptive younger sister (and, as it turns out, Mary Sue love toy) Hazuki chokes them down them anyway, correctly interpreting them as an expression of Hatsumi's feelings for her. Lilith is less forgiving, refusing even to touch them and saying that anyone who eats them is incapable of ever feeling happiness again.
- Closely subverted in Magical Pokaan: the first time we see the girls eating Aiko's food, they carefully taste it... and right when you expect them to hurl, they say "Average".
- In AI Love You, Number Thirty's experience of food is limited to having seen pictures of finished recipes in books, and her attempts to reproduce them fail because she has no idea that they're supposed to be made of edible substances.
- A major cause of this was a lack of sense taste for Thirty. This get fixed fairly quickly when it's discovered, however, making Thirty (with a little training) a decent, non-lethal cook.
- Jin in Samurai Champloo. After accidentally taking a job at an unagi stand (he had thought the "kiru" job would involve, well, killing), he cooks one for a stranger who had helped him with the eels. He burns the living Hell out of it, and she calls it "the worst thing I've ever tasted." This is part of a running gag about Jin having absolutely no aptitude for anything but kendo.
- Rosette Christopher is one of these. As a child she baked a batch of cookies so bad it caused Chrono to foam at the mouth.
- In the manga, apparently, she got better (she was accepted as cook in public kitchen, even Chrono says that when her soup looks horrible, the taste is decent).
- Ai from Popotan. Her sisters feared the worst when Daichi took a bite of a sandwich she made, but after wearing a pained expression on his face for several seconds he admits it's tasty, but tastes "a bit unique". And let's not mention the purple eggs she once made...
- Subverted in The Law Of Ueki: while Mori Ai's cooking looks unappetizing (it seems to contain live, squirming purple octopus tentacles), it actually tastes quite good and doesn't have any ill effects on the eater.
- Tsukamoto Tenma and Sawachika Eri from School Rumble qualify for this trope. For starters, you definitely would not want them making rice balls for you... Right, Harima?
- Kyouka from Kyouran Kazoku Nikki. Only Yuka is able to eat her cooking without ill effect.
- Just to clarify here: The... "food"... is begging to be eaten in order to be put out of its misery.
- Subverted in episode 7. A pair of former assassin siblings open a restaurant, where their cooking nearly kills all of their customers, until Chika realizes that the cooking is too good to be consumed by normal humans.
- From Black Cat, Professor Tearju is such an awful cook that when Train and Sven opened the door to her home, they were completely overwhelmed by the horrific smell. Professor Tearju is a bit of a klutz, so when she trips, and spills the resulting mess on Sven's hat, he starts screaming that his hat is covered in living puke. Hilarity ensues.
- Literal in Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni with the infamous needle onigiri.
- Subverted 'cause it was all a delusion by Keiichi.
- Played straight in one episode. Keiichi's parents are out of town, and he has to cook for himself. He almost burns the house down.
- Chef Kawasaki from the Kirby anime is a rather rare subversion, as his cooking is pretty bad but not inedible. Then there's the episode with the flying pie monster... you're better off seeing that one for yourself.
- In the third season of Monster Rancher, it's revealed that Golem dreams of becoming a chef and opening his own restaurant. Unfortunately, as a creature that eats rocks and drinks sand, his recipes need a lot of work.
- Arthur/England from Axis Powers Hetalia loves to cook, but the food he makes is terrible to the point that Roderich/Austria even tells him that he's sorry for England for having such horrible cuisine. One comic jokes that his lack of taste is the reason Alfred/America's cuisine is the way it is; in another, England does NOT like how America tells him his scones suck and mauls him in front of everyone.
- In the Christmas Special, Tino/Finland's food is called evil by his own puppy Hana-Tamago. The problem isn't that he cooks badly... but that the ingredients and combinations he uses are, well, "special"
- As with a decent chunk of the running gags in Hetalia, this one is based on a cultural sterotype - that the English in general cannot cook. In Finland's case, it's a commentary on that country's seriously weird cuisine.
- Inspired by a poll of what qualities boys desire most, Luna tries her hand at cooking in the Mega Man Star Force anime to win MegaMan's affection. The terrifying results lead her to seek training from Geo's mom. It doesn't help; fortunately for Geo, she's soon distracted when "cleaning skill" wins the next poll. She comes back to cooking at some point before the sequel series Tribe starts, and makes actual progress this time — in fact, the food she brings turns out to be the only reason anyone comes to Hyde's art classes.
- Carrera and Anju in Karin attempt to make a normal human dinner when Karin brings her Muggle friend Maki over for the night. Since they're both vampires and don't actually eat human food, they don't know how to cook it either (Karin, being an "unvampire", is the only one that cooks) and the results only look edible.
- Hikari in Lamune likes her food really spicy... leading to those familiar with her to fear any time she decides to cook. Also results in a humorous incident during the Class Trip when the group leaves the curry pot unattended and she goes to take a look...
- Sawanaguchi Sae, in Magic User's Club, lives in Tokyo with her older sister Saki. Sae usually does the cooking. One time in the OVA she comes home and finds Saki trying to cook. Sae asks what she's making, and Saki says, "Tomato Stew." Sae asks why she's making it out of red chili paste, and Saki asks, "What's that?" At which point Sae says, "I think you should let me do the cooking."
- Both Ryoko Mitsurugi and Azumi Kiribayashi (potentially) of Samurai Girl: Real Bout High School live up to this trope in a parody of Iron Chef. When the judges are about to taste the bento lunches made by the girls, they are stolen by Shizuma Kusanagi and consumed on the run, which causes him to turn green and vomit improbable quantities of grey foam.
- In Detective Conan, the direct reason for Kogoro and Eri's separation is the latter's cooking was too awful. Even Shinichi knows this.
- Played with in Yu-Gi-Oh GX; Professor Sartyr is, himself, a very good cook, but his deck is constructed with killer cooking in mind, complete with vegetable warrior monsters, spice-based spells and traps that screw with the opponent's monsters, and his key card, a demonic chef by name of "Curry Fiend Roux".
- Miyabi of Ninin Ga Shinobuden. Episode 6 sees her taking making dinner for the ninjas after Shinobu gets stuck at Kaede's house by a typhoon. She creates a stew that includes leeks, chicken legs, broccoli, lettuce, apples, a whole duck (complete with feathers and beak), a boot, an umbrella, and what appears to be somebody's buttocks as ingredients. She then adds pepper actually gunpowder, but she can't tell, which causes the whole mess to explode.
- In Futaba Kun Change Misaki over sweetens her food to the point her homemade chocolate sponatenously combusted.
- There are three in Hell Teacher Nube, albeit with a slight justification for each: Yukime can cook well, but her food is frozen solid and instantly freezes whoever eats it (she improves after events of some magnitude and learns to cook hot meals.) Kyoko's food is indistinguishable from roadkill, but she's still in fifth grade. And Minki tries really hard, but her meals (which still twitch and stare back at you) are not meant for human consumption.
- Nana of Elfen Lied, having been raised in a lab, is a terrible cook, often burning the food she makes. Oh, and watch out when she handles a cleaver too...
- The boss of the Gaba thieves in Doki Doki Densetsu Mahoujin Guru Guru is a Lethal Chef who loves to cook. To make it worse, criticizing his cooking will cause him to become lethal in more traditional ways. He allows Nike to become his disciple solely on the basis of making Kukuri teach him to cook better.
- Hikari in Special A has a habit of overexerting her strength, resulting in ingredients getting pulverized. She also overloads on the base ingredients for her dishes, which combined with the above results in a perfectly smooth rice ball dense enough to crack the floor. Oddly, for this trope, she tends to add too 'little'' seasoning - so even her curry ends up watery and bland.
- That's not even everything. The kitchen has a tendency to explode when she's cooking something. In fact later in the manga when Hikari and Finn are being held captive in Finn's castle, Finn takes Hikari to the kitchen and has her cook something. This causes an explosion which gives Kei and Ryuu a general idea of where they were. And Finn uses Hikari's food to knock out the guards.
- A hilarious double subversion occurs in Read Or Die TV: Sumiregawa-sensei comes home to find a fancy dinner and a beaming Michelle, her hands covered in bandages. Sensei is careful to sit down and taste it... and to her surprise it's delicious. She praises Michelle, but Michelle corrects her, saying she had a go at cooking earlier and since that didn't go so well she ordered something instead, upon which she hands Sensei the check. So Yeah.
- Sun Shangxiang Gerbera in BB Senshi Sangokuden.
- Both Hagu and Yamada from Honey And Clover are terrible cooks with chocolate and mushroom curry, chocolate mintkin (a pumpkin topped with chocolate mint icecream), and Grapefruit Pilaff. In an interesting subversion, the mangas English language editor made Grapefruit Pilaff herself, thought it was nice, and published the recipie. Indeed, all of Hagu and Yamadas cooking seems to be considered lethal based on personal preference alone (this troper really hates both pumpkin and mint)
- In Sasameki Koto, Sumika's cooking tends to result in Stuff Blowing Up. Miyako isn't much better.
- Hime-chan's cookies make little girls cry.
- Saya's cooking is so lethal that her fellow gangmembers collapse, including one who experienced actual poison. It seems to run in the family, since her sister can not only drink the tea she makes, but actually enjoys it.
- Natsuki from Yoake Mae Yori Ruri Iro Na gets the nickname "Carbon Master" because everything she cooks tends to end up looking like charcoal (even a salad). She improves somewhat in Moonlight Cradle.
- If you have to ask why Brock is the Team Chef in the Pokemon anime, there was one time May caught a buttload of berries and blended them into Pokeblocks. The team tried them and subsequently gagged; she thought that it's like that because Pokeblocks are meant for feeding to Pokemon. ... Put quick and dirty, if only a Munchlax can eat your Pokeblocks without succumbing to agony from the taste alone, you're doing something very wrong.
- In all its glory. Note that she just K.O.'ed Ash's entire team faster than any major villain in the series.
- Yako's mother from Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro. Yako is just as famous for her immense appetite as she is for being a detective, yet even she is afraid of the meals her mother cooks.
- Some examples of how disastrous her cooking can get:
- Her idea of for preparing is to visit a hardware store. Sure, some tools can be used for cooking, but a power drill, hacksaw and chainsaw don't really suit cooking.
- For a town carnival, she brewed some pork soup. 95% of the tasters were hospitalized.
- Her ingredients that go into a cake (egg shells, whole chicken wings, fish bait, balloons, oil paint) forget that some of those are inedible. It starts to smell like rubber when it's baking. Then for the icing, she mixed in nitroglycerin. To be fair, Neuro provided the icing recipe.
- Her Valentine's Day chocolate looked like a chunk of steel and smelled like a dead animal.
- In Shuffle!, Nerine says that all her cooking attempts ended up in disasters, including explosions. She eventually manages to make on oemlette, but never managed to expand the repertoire. In the graphic novel, her father was so happy he wanted to make it a holiday.
- Kenichi The Mightiest Disciple has Shigure and Apachai starting out like this, although they (or at least Shigure) becomes more competent later on. Their joint attempt to make tea for Kenichi's sister resulted in what appears to be a fishbowl filled with seaweed.
- Comes in two forms in Ergo Proxy. Like Bender below, Pino is a robot who doesn't eat and as such as no idea how to make food palatable to humans. In episode 16, Re-l shows a different form of this, failing to boil pasta successfully. In her case, it's the consequence of a life lived in a seemingly utopian dome with all work done by robotic servants, and perhaps a bit of Feminine Women Can Cook as well.
Comic Books
- Bruce Wayne. That's right, children, there's one skill Batman entirely failed to master. It goes from ruining the kitchen as he attempts to prepare chicken soup to, well...
- In one particularly badly-written issue, Alfred took skill levels in lethal chef. He ran out of baking soda, so he used salt instead. (Any basic cook should know that one's a rising agent, the other's a flavouring.)
Folk Lore
- An ancient Chinese story tells of a comatose general being saved from hunger by two beggars. The dish in itself was terrible (consisting of trampled spinach, rotten beancurd and unpotable water), but he didn't notice because he was semi-conscious, instead thinking it delicious. When he became emperor, he ordered said beggars to present said meal to his ministers. Afraid to lose face, they all gulped it down. The Emperor, realizing how horrible the dish was, still drank it all. The two beggars ended up rich.
Film
- Lane Meyer's mother Jenny (played by Kim Darby) from the 1985 John Cusack film Better Off Dead. In one scene Jenny is shown cooking a pot full of something emitting a suspicious mist from which tentacles wave, and in another, one of her dishes actually crawls off of Lane's plate when he pokes it with a fork. Even her "ordinary" meals are somewhat ... skewed, as evidenced by the "French-themed" dinner she makes for a French exchange student — consisting entirely of foods with the word "French" in their names, like French dressing and French toast.
"It's got raisins in it... you like raisins!"
- In the extended edition of The Two Towers, director Peter Jackson inexplicably turned Eowyn — who in reality would have learned very early on to cook over an open fire and with whatever supplies were available — into a borderline Lethal Chef who proudly presents Aragorn with a bowl of "soup" containing some limp boiled leaves, one gelatinous dumpling, and a puddle of liquid shimmering with grease. (To be fair, she could have been nervous due to the presence of Aragorn. Apparently Viggo Mortensen can do that.)
- I interpreted it as a "sorry, but this is all we have right now."
- She was too proud of the culinary terror she'd created for that.
- There's really not much reason to assume that Eowyn would have learned to cook, even less to cook over an open fire. As the niece of a king that's hardly a work she has to learn, no more than anyone would have expected an early medieval princes to know her way around a kitchen. (Or these days Paris Hilton.) Neither did anyone expect her to fight or do patrols like her brother, so no reason for outdoor skills.
- Jack Black's character Nacho from Nacho Libre is like this initially. Once he makes enough money (through his wrestling) to purchase better ingredients, he's capable of making dishes that at least look appetizing.
- In Ratatouille, Linguini, before meeting Remy, makes a soup so bad that when he tastes it he pukes and Remy nearly does when he sniffs it.
- In the first Bridget Jones book (and movie), Bridget attempts to cook soup from scratch. The recipe says to tie some of the ingredients together with string before putting them in the pot. She uses blue plastic string and turns the soup blue. It's later referred to as String Soup.
- In the Blue Collar Comedy Tour movie, comedian Ron White tells a joke about how his wife was such a bad cook that he tried to feed it to his dog and it started licking its butt. His wife asks "What's he doing?" and he goes "It looks like he's trying to get the taste out of his mouth!"
- Isabelle in The Dreamers cooks for narrator Matthew and her brother Theo. The food is so badly burned that they can't tell the souffle from the ratatouille, and tastes so bad that Matthew can't swallow it. Theo happily goes downstairs and raids the neighbors' garbage for an alternative meal.
- Bullshot. Rosemary Fenton's rock-hard scones are an ongoing joke. When the hero nearly breaks a tooth on one and tries to covertly dispose of the scone, he finds every hiding place in the house already stuffed with scones disgarded by previous guests.
- Humphrey of Cannibal The Musical:
Miller: [seeing their dinner] You son of a bitch, Humphrey.
Humphrey: Come on, you haven't even tried it.
Miller: [Miller takes a mouthful] You son of a bitch, Humphrey.
- In Down Periscope, on the submarine Stingray, hyper executive officer Marty Pascal (played masterfully by Rob Schneider) is berating the cook, Buckman, for the ill-kept nature of his kitchen, when he spies an open can.
Pascal: Jesus, Buckman! This stuff's been on the Stingray since Korea! This can expired in 1966!!
Buckman: *tastes from the can* What's the matter, sir? It still tastes like creamed corn...
Pascal: Except it's deviled ham!!
Buckman: ...That would be a problem.
Literature
- In Artemis Fowl for a example, the lead attempts to make a sandwich that is described as an explosion on a plate.
- An entire race of literally Lethal Chefs is found in the Discworld series, in the form of dwarf bread. Used less as a food and more as a weapon, its main ingredient is apparently gravel. Its most useful purpose when used as rations is to make everything else look edible. Note that this is intentional on their part, and they can cook other dishes that are perfectly edible to any race (at least, if you don't mind rat).
- Of course, the trope is also subverted by the Vimes household; Lady Sybil is a bad cook, but Sam has spent so much time eating low-quality food on the streets of Ankh-Morpork that he actually enjoys it.
- Let's not forget Archchancellor Ridcully, who swears by (or, swears at) Wow-Wow sauce, a dangerous and highly unstable condiment that includes sulfur and saltpeter, and an equally potent alcoholic drink called scumble. Wow-Wow sauce might have been a contributing factor in the explosive death of his uncle, who invented the stuff.
- To be fair, he had a charcoal biscuit to settle his stomach after he had a lot of Wow-Wow sauce. That didn't help much. Gunpowder is made of sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal (mixed properly)
- Albert counts too, but its not so important when you're the cook in Death's household. He firmly believes in grease, fat and black gritty bits. His porridge eats spoons.
- And we can't forget the borderline inedible pies of CMOT Dibbler.
- "Could I interest you in some yoghurt? Onna stick?"
- ...as well as: Disembowel-Meself-Honourably Dibhala's funny-colored antique eggs, Al-Jiblah's highly suspicious cous-cous, the terrible yak-butter tea made by May-I-Never-Achieve Enlightenment Dibhlang and the unmentionable blubber of May-I-Be-Kicked-Into-My-Own-Ice-Hole Dibooki (main ingredient: exploded whale), the green beer of May-I-Swallow-My-Own-Blowdart Dlang-Dlang and the meat pie floater in pea soup with tomato sauce (regional speciality of the last continent).
- Bungling Inventor Bergholt Stutly "Bloody Stupid" Johnson took up cooking on a few points in his life. His attempt to make a pie took out a significant portion of Ankh-Morpork.
- Mrs Samuel Whiskers from Beatrix Potter's Tale Of Samuel Whiskers And The Roly Poly Pudding.
- The outdoor humorist Patrick McManus has written extensively about growing up in a household headed by his hard, fearless, super-competent mother, commenting that the only thing she couldn't bend to her will was food. He learned to "scrape off the burnt parts".
- He's also written about the dangers of hunting-camp cooking. Most important tip: avoid the green hash.
- There is an entire rhyming children's book about this very subject called The Great School Lunch Rebellion.
- Hagrid's poor attempts at cooking are the butt of many jokes in Harry Potter
- Inverted in a Roger Zelazny book, Isle of the Dead. The main character employs an alien chef who can prepare the finest specialties of human cuisine, but owing to biology and personal taste, considers the dishes as something between vomit-inducing garbage and toxic chemistry experiments.
- Jay Leno's childrens book If Roast Beef Could Fly has Jay's father, who attempts to do a bbq every year but fails miserably in someway- he even says that his father throws the roast when it's done.
- A strange subversion in Lambs To The Slaughter: A woman beats her husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb then cooks it and serves it to the police who are investigating.
- At least one of Mercedes Lackey's SERRAted Edge books features a Sidhe warrior attempting to cook breakfast. Mind, the Sidhe ordinarily magic their food out of thin air... The sequence includes such gems as breaking the number of eggs required by the recipe and then "carefully picking out most of the shells" and figuring that hey, tomato paste, Tobasco... Both red sauces, a 1-1 substitution should be perfectly cromulent.
- Interestingly enough this disaster actually becomes a major plot point instead of just a random funny. He gives up after recognizing his failure and conjures the breakfast- but doesn't do it sneakily enough, blowing his human cover identiity.
- The searat captain Slipp in ''The Bellmaker'' claims to be a cook rather than a pirate when trying to get into the Abbey. Of course he's told to prove it. His patented "skilly an' duff" contains a wide range of vegetation of dubious non-toxicity and the smell is compared to that of a compost heap, thus blowing his cover.
- Molly Carpenter from the Dresden Files is a borderline lethal chef. According to Harry she one time burned a boiled egg, and refers to her kitchen attempts as "committing dinner." At least she can make coffee.
- While we never actually got to read about Shae's cooking in A Song of Ice and Fire , she did mention that "every man who tasted her cooking told [her] what a good whore [she is]."
- Mostly subverted in Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. The main character is actually a Supreme Chef most of the time, but she has the semi-magical ability to channel her emotions into her food. When baking a wedding cake for her sister's marriage to the man she wanted to marry herself, her despair affects the cake and makes people sick to their stomachs. When tossing leftovers to the chickens she raised after having an argument with her sister, her anger makes the chickens attack and kill each other after eating what she feeds them.
- In the children's book Olson's Meat Pies, a once-gourmet restaurant runs out of ingredients and in desperation starts putting all sorts of inedible objects in its pies. Popular outcry follows.
Live Action TV
- The Hong Kong game show Beautiful Cooking is built completely on this trope...and Bishoujo
- My Parents Are Aliens. Virtually everything cooked by Sophie Johnson uses rather... nonstandard ingredients. Like sausage cake, or chicken nuggets — complete with bones, feathers and "fresh" chemical additives.
- Neelix from Star Trek Voyager. While his meals are never actually lethal, they are often deeply disgusting to the human palate. It's only when he tries to show off his "skills" do the wheels come off. When he sticks to the basics (or recipes), things turn out nice.
- Likewise, Captain Janeway manages to ruin food that comes from the replicator!
- This surprises you? Everything that woman touches turns to shit.
- In one episode of Star Trek The Next Generation, Riker invites a few of the other officers over to show off his experimental cooking (some sort of alien omlette). Most of them are clearly attempting to conceal their distaste, while Worf eagerly scarfs up his portion. In a later episode, Riker is shown apparently enjoying Klingon dishes.
- This one was NOT Riker's fault. Not entirely, anyway. He had no reason to assume the eggs would be nasty. His technique was flawless, he just had poor ingredients and didn't test the unknown eggs beforehand. (And seeing as Worf enjoyed them, they can't be completely inedible...just not suited to human tastes.
- Quark from Star Trek Deep Space Nine was apparently a Lethal Chef, necessitating certain defensive measures.
Quark: "This is my disruptor pistol. The one I used to carry in the old days, when I was serving on that Ferengi freighter."
Odo: "I thought you were the ship's cook."
Quark: "That's right, and every member of that crew thought he was a food critic."
- The first series of the Brit Com The Vicar Of Dibley featured Letitia Cropley, known as "The Queen of Cordon Bleugh" and "The Dibley Poisoner". Her recipes included Marmite cake, peanut butter and anchovy sandwiches, and tripe salad. She also bred her own snails, apparently for Bread and Butter Pudding Surprise.
- Rimmer in Red Dwarf only attempted to cook once, but it was enough for both his living crewmates to require stomach-pumps.
Lister: Rimmer, real dumplings, proper dumplings, when they're properly cooked to perfection, real, proper dumplings should not bounce!
- Possibly justified in that Rimmer is a hologram and had to have the robotic Scutters do the actual food preparation following his commands. He acknowledges this by pointing out that if you tell them to "keep an eye" on something cooking they just watch it burn. He still seemed to think he had done rather well, though of course he couldn't try any of it himself. But it's Rimmer. Of course it's going to be awful.
- Baldrick in Blackadder. Naturally, he is also the only chef from series 3 onwards.
- In Blackadder Goes Forth, he does at least have the excuse of limited resources. Try his recipe for "Rat Au Van"!
- “Cup of coffee, Darling?”
- "How did you manage to extract so much 'custard' from such a small cat?"
- Lisa Douglas from Green Acres. Her infamous "hotscakes" have the consistency of bricks.
- Mr. Douglas was terrified when his neighbor, Mr. Ziffel, asks Lisa for a shopping bag full of her pancakes. Mr. Douglas, very worried, asks him if he's going to eat them. Mr. Douglas calms down when he finds out Mr. Ziffel only wants them to reshingle the roof of his barn.
- In an episode of Friends, Rachel tries to prepare a traditional English trifle, but the pages of the recipe book get stuck together and she ends up making half a Shepherd's Pie: a trifle containing jam, custard, ladyfingers, and beef sautéed with peas and onions. Ross says that "it tastes like feet", but that doesn't stop Joey: "Custard, good. Jam, good. Meat, good!"
- In another, Monica reviews a restaurant and calls the food inedible. "None of my friends could eat it, and one of them eats books!" (Joey, of course.)
- This troper can't remember who was responsible, but Rachel did say one time "(that dog) will lick itself but it will not touch your sandwich, what does that tell you?"
- The point of the British Reality Show Kitchen Criminals is to get horrendous cooks around England and have world class chefs teach them how to cook fine cuisine for a food critic. Some of the contestants when they first started tried to serve shrimp raw or fry an apple core.
- A running gag in My Family is that Susan, the mother of the titular family, is the worst cook in the world.
- Similarly with Ria in Butterflies.
- One My Family Christmas epsode featured not only chocolate raisin turkey with caramel (due to pages of the cookbook being stuck together) but also this exchange.
Ben: Before that was the year of the turkey.
Susan: OK, so it needed to be in for a bit longer.
Ben: Susan, it was still alive.
- Susan from Desperate Housewives, being The Ditz, ruins every dish she cooks.
- Lucy from I Love Lucy. Wah!
- As bad as Lucy is, she's demonstrably better than both Ricky and Fred, as shown in the episode where the men undertake the women's typical responsibility and vice versa. Fred ends up flooding the whole apartment with rice when he assumes the proper portion is one pound per person.
- A skit on All That is called The Filthy Chef which is a parody of The Naked Chef.
- One word: Joxer. In one episode, Xena and Gabrielle are incapacitated (by skin fungus and head lice) and it falls to Joxer to defeat the entire invading army - by cooking for them. He's actually successful. Too bad our heroines discover his "skill" by first falling victim to it themselves...
- Hercules The Legendary Journeys also had a recurring character called Falafel who was a lethal chef and a parody of modern day fast food franchises.
- A recurring gag on The Beverly Hillbillies concerned how awful Ellie Mae's cooking was. Even Jethro had trouble eating it.
- The Japanese Iron Chef had a turkey battle. Offerings included turkey sashimi.
- Far more memorable: tuna sorbet. For the rest of the series, whenever a chef headed for the ice cream maker, the commentators would recall it.
- Subverted with some crab ice cream, which the judges enjoyed. It was described as something along the lines of "sweet, with a hint of crab, not at all fishy, and surprisingly good!"
- Also subverted with some beer ice cream in the US edition. The beer wasn't the surprising part, it was the caramelized bacon on top of the ice cream that threw people off. And yet the judges loved it.
- Cod soft roe ice cream. Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai was chastised by the entire tasting panel for it. He later proved he didn't learn his lesson by making trout ice cream on one of the US edition pilots.
- Jill Taylor on Home Improvement, though to be fair half of this is via Informed Inability (Tim and other people's comments); she's shown to be at least decent more than once.
- An interesting subversion is Wilson. He's a good cook, but his meals are of the Foreign Queasine variety (eel pie and tadpole soup, anyone?).
- Becky on Full House has this reputation, one episode even has a B-plot with her and Michelle learning to cook together.
- Thelma from Amen was a notoriously bad cook. In one episode following her wedding to the Reverend, she burned down their apartment while cooking chicken with the gang locked inside. Everyone panicked except for Rolly, who knew "Thelma's cooking would kill us all one day" and read the newspaper as smoke filled the room and the others made frantic calls to 911.
- Anil from The Basil Brush Show. There are so many examples that could be listed.
- In one episode when he temporarily loses the cafe, being an expert in the field of bad food, he becomes the new food hygiene inspector for the local council.
Stephen: What happened to the old one?
Anil: (funeral music starts playing) One of my pies.
- A pool of his chilli sauce can substitute for a Lava Pit.
- In another episode, he makes something that actually tastes good (according to the main cast). But then...
Basil: 'Ere, Anil. How did you get rid of those rats in the end?
(Silence. One by one they stop eating as it dawns on them...)
- Barth from You Cant Do That On Television was known to blow his nose in the burger buns.
- Not to mention where some of the "meat" in the burgers would often come from. The source was sometimes hinted at early in the sketch, usually prompting a chorus of "What do you think's in the burgers?" from the kid customers. Barth would confirm their suspicions ("I heard that!"), and the kids would start vomiting.
- Airi from Kamen Rider Den-O can brew a mean cup of coffee, but she also makes health foods for her brother Ryotaro that are...less than pleasant. Think "sesame seed milkshake". One episode actually has the two in a spat because Ryotaro called the cops to dispose of one of Airi's stews as a bio-hazard.
- Naomi, the waitress on the DenLiner has the opposite problem. She can prepare tasty foods like rice and pudding, but her coffee is a powdery, whipped cream-topped disaster that is only enjoyed by the Imagin.
- Shirishi Mako of Samurai Sentai Shinkenger, complete with dubious knife-cutting style. By episode 25, the sight of her holding an apron has traumatised the Kuroko.
- Maddie Magellan from Jonathan Creek Perhaps not truly lethal, but upon opening her oven and discovering the contents to be in flames, she declared that it needed "Two more minutes" and closed the oven door again.
- Manny is, at least according to Bernard on Black Books: "You call this a tower of soup? Where are the minarets? The turrets?"
- Jackie from That70s Show. She rarely tries to cook (as she put it, she was hoping to get on by her looks), but when she does try, the results are disastrous.
- Debra from Everybody Loves Raymond. Or So I Heard...
- In one episode of The Nanny, C.C. has been attending a cooking class, and gets Maxwell to try some of her cooking. He reluctantly does so, and ends up going to the hospital with food poisoning. This all leads to a scene where Fran, disguised as a candy striper, is asked to shave Maxwell in preparation for surgery...
- TV's Frank, quite literally, in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000:
Dr. Forrester: What? You baked a person in it? An hour at 350?
Newspaper Comics
- The comic strip Fox Trot treats us to both an invocation and partial-lampshading, with matriarch Andrea Fox and daughter Paige. Andy is actually a good cook, though she has a tendency to try and prepare "healthy" foods that are thoroughly inedible and borderline toxic (such as tofu...anything, really). Paige, on the other hand, has been shown to be able to cause boiling pasta to burst into flames. Pasta that is submerged in water.
(while discussing Survivor's food challenges)
Peter: That reminds me. I think Mom is letting Paige cook dinner tonight.
Jason: A perfect example. Have them eat something like that!
Peter: But don't you need to have a survivor?
- Irma's Diner in Garfield. The soup has hair in it with rollers, the coffee tastes like turpentine, there is a hoof in the meat loaf, the cows for the hamburgers are burned alive, and so on.
- Cookie, the military cook from Beetle Bailey probably qualifies. Thankfully, one of the soldiers he caters to is Sargent Snorkel, who will eat anything.
- Yosefa from the Israeli comic Zbeng! specializes in inedible, rock hard doughnuts. She once used a batch of radioactive yeast to make them extra fluffy, which created a gigantic mutant doughnut that threatened to crush the school.
- And even worse, she has a truly loving boyfriend, who eats everything she cooks. He is a model patient in the hospital's stomach pumping section...
- Calvin And Hobbes: Calvin claims his mother is one of these. Sometimes her cooking attacks him outright, sometimes it tries to eat him, though he reserves his most horrified reaction for the dish that sings "Feelings" to him. Of course, the strip lends itself to questioning Calvin's interpretations of events.
- In one strip, Calvin's dad comes home from work to discover there's eggplant casserole for dinner - he works this out based on a group of snow sculptures by Calvin in the garden showing a sequence of the food being eaten (mouth, throat, stomach) with difficulty then a snowman dead on it's face.
- Calvin is a bona fide Lethal Chef. In one Strip, Calvin's Mom is sick so Calvin makes her Breakfast in bed; Bacon, Eggs and Toast. Calvin delivers his mom the bacon smoldering and with a chisel to chip it out of the pan. When his mom asks about the eggs and toast, Calvin replies "Dad said not to tell you about that until you're better".
Tabletop Games
- Squee, from Magic The Gathering. See the cards Recycle and medicine Bag.
- This troper's RPG game included a character who could literally cause Salads to self-immolate, that's how bad he cooks.
- In Entropy Inc's Star Wars campaign, the titular crew stole/refurbished a cooking droid. Unforunately, everything it made tasted like bantha burger.
Theater
- In Sweeney Todd, we first meet Mrs. Lovett while she's telling Sweeney (and us) how awful her meat pies are ("The Worst Pies In London"). Interesting how nobody seems to notice the connection between the barber moving in upstairs and how good her pies suddenly get...
- More interesting to this troper is the question of why her cooking skills miraculously improve as soon as she has a ready supply of meat. Are we supposed to assume that the mere lack of filling is enough to turn a delicious pie into the worst pie in London? I mean, empty pie crusts aren't exactly the most exciting food, but they're not that bad.
- This page has examples of people ruining toast. Trust me, anything is possible.
- I think it's mostly that Sweeney Todd just likes her human meat pies that much, not that they suddenly get that good.
- Well, she did imply that she was getting dead animals off the street for her filling before, so maybe at least now the meat's fresh.
- What she implied was that Mrs. Mooney's pie shop was using cat meat, and that she'd never think of doing that...because the cats are too fast for her. And it's not necessarily that her cooking was inherently bad, per se, but rather she likely didn't care enough to put forth some skill and make the pies palatable, since the ingredients were terrible to begin with.
- So the human meat was just a Magic Feather?
- This Troper recalls a case in his country when a man was knows in the entire city for his delicious meat pies. Eventually, the police found out that he used dead hobos as a meat source. Other similar cases happened around the world, which makes one think that human meat must taste really good.
- This troper heard it tastes like slightly-gamey pork.
- Cannibal Issei Sagawa (who is free right now) seems to think it tastes like tuna
- Journalist Willam Seabrook claimed, from personal experience, that it was flavorless meat quite similar to veal.
- The entire plot of Nunsense is set into motion in the aftermath of Sister Julia, Child of God, having killed all but five of the Little Sisters of Hoboken with a tainted batch of vichyssoise soup.
Video Games
- Super Robot Wars's Kusuha Mizuha and her energy Drinks, best described elsewhere. The real example occurs in the form of Leona Garstein, whose food tastes awful and has a habit of knocking people out, which is something she admits happens. In one scene, she cooks for her boyfriend, and as she cooks she pouts about how it's just going to knock him out again. However, this is apparently related to her taste in food; when given the advice to cook something she thinks would be awful, the others think it's delicious while she hates it. The first time Leona's boyfriend tried her cooking, he needed something to wash it down. Unfortunately for him, Kusuha was the only person nearby.
- This is also subverted outside the Original Generation games. The classic timeline has a Lethal Chef in form of Tytti Noorbuck, one of the heralds of the Elemental Lords. The problem lies within her sense of taste, since she loves sweet foods, she'll make anything she cooks to become overly sweet... so sweet you could get your stomach swollen by eating it. In addition, cooking is her hobby (though in her defense, she's trying to improve)
- A recurring theme in the Tales Series:
- Raine Sage from Tales of Symphonia is such a bad cook that at one point she evidently manages to make an angelic being nauseated. This is reflected by how her ability to cook (a feature that restores health and various other things) starts at horrible and is maxed out at borderline decent, with her title being given as "Passable Chef?". Considering she and her much younger brother lost their parents at an early age, it's often wondered how they survived until Genis was old enough to cook...
- A skit in Dawn of the New World explains that it mostly comes from her obsessive tendency towards bizarrely expirementive food. For instance she once tried to get Marta and Emil to eat a rice-stuffed lemon skin. This was also touched on in a skit in the original game, too: "Spicy cake would be a breakthrough!" Marta from the same game is also an example, but eventually gets better—it turns out she never bothered to taste her food.
- It should be noted out that, according to the available cooking stats, Sheena is the only female playable character in the Symphonia games to be good at cooking. Emil even points this out in a skit.
- Richter Abend is on the road to becoming a lethal cook. On the first time he actually cooks, he knocks Emil unconscious.
- Tales Of The Abyss had Princess Natalia L.K Landvaldear, who had no speck of talent in cooking and mixed healing spells into burnt dishes in an attempt to reverse the burning; even the resident cook gave up teaching her. Even her supposed fiancé Asch cooks better than her. Luke is a pretty poor cook as well.
- This troper would like to point out that while Luke was a bad cook, he was actually the "best" person to cook for the party gameplay-wise, considering Abyss had that little unmentioned nuance where your character would actually LOSE HP and Overlimit for eating food they disliked, but where the cook avoids such a penalty. Since Luke is the pickiest eater of the group (his dislikes including every bit of seafood in the game), training him for cooking is the best choice.
- To a more literal degree, Jade may qualify as a lethal chef. In a skit, he mentions how he might just slip some poison into the food to test its effectiveness. More often than not, though, he is a decent cook, albeit one with a strange love of potatoes.
- Another Lethal Chef in the series is Arche of Tales Of Phantasia.
- Flynn from Tales Of Vesperia was such a horrible cook that Yuri had to learn to cook for himself. Yuri just never had the heart to tell Flynn how bad he was.
- Actually, Yuri mentions that Flynn is a somewhat decent cook when he follows the recipe and it's his sense of taste that's skewed. Flynn can most likely eat whatever he makes- it's lethal for anyone else.
- Indeed, if you choose Yuri for the Cooking Tournament, he will face off against Flynn, with spectacular results. The resulting food LOOKS superb, but causes he entire panel of judges to fall into chaos (one of the judges disappears in a puff of smoke.) And despite this, Flynn remains as blissfully unaware of his horrible cooking as ever...
- Jean Armstrong of Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations has a tendency to make even basic-looking dishes taste terrible. He calls a simple lobster meal the "Twen-T" because it costs $20 to
eat order.
- Viola Cadaverini's baked goods and coffee probably aren't good for you either, considering how she laughs maliciously whenever she offers some to the main characters.
- According to her supports, Lalam the Dancer from Fire Emblem 6.
- Tanith of Fire Emblem 9 admits to Oscar that she is a Lethal Chef, although it sounds like she causes injuries to those nearby as she cooks.
- While never actually shown baking, GLaDOS from Portal lists a cake recipe near the end of the game that includes such ingredients as solid waste, dirt, volatile organic compounds, rhubarb "on fire", needle guns, and preservatives intended to "deodorize and preserve putrid tissue."
- .."shaped like fish."
- Fish shaped ethyl benzene, and enough rhubarb to kill someone, if she used the wrong part of it.
- It's probably a lie.
- This also appeared in Jade Empire, where the main character meets a Lethal Chef named Chai Jin. If you can eat three courses without passing out, each of which actually damages one of your precious health bars, he will reward you... or offer you the chance to go even further, with a truly vile dish he won't even try himself.
- It also seems to show up in Final Fantasy XII. One of the chop sidequests in Archades involves matching up a dangerously experimental chef with a bored philosopher of cuisine.
- The direct sequel Revenant Wings also reveals that Penelo's cooking is to be feared, though she genuinely tries to get better. Vaan seems to be the only person that likes it, though it's not easy to tell if its because he likes the food or just because he likes Penelo. Several sidequests revolve around getting rare ingredients in an attempt to help Penelo make edible dishes. By the time you complete them all she's actually improved to the point that unbiased parties think she's pretty good.
- One of the Persona 3 Social Links involves Fuuka "Tank, I need an exit" Yamagishi, who recruits the main character to taste test her food. Just being able to volunteer requires maximum courage — her cooking is foul enough to chase off nearby animals.
- The level of Courage required for this Social Link is literally titled "Bad Ass". That's how bad her cooking is. On the other hand, as you hang out with her, her cooking gradually improves, and it doesn't take long before she serves up something that is not only edible, but good.
- All three main girls of Persona 4 have very questionable cooking abilities, ranging from Rise (way too spicy), Yukiko (who can make an omelet taste "boneless") and Chie (just plain awful). When the latter two combine their powers, the result is dubbed Mystery Food X and manage to take out both the main male leads in one spoonful.
- To give an idea, Rise's cooking goes over better than the other two's, despite her putting fois gras (i.e., fattened duck liver) in an omelette.
- You're probably wondering about the "boneless" comment. During one event during the game, Yukiko makes an omelet that, through a process that can only be described as Alchemical, has no taste at all.
- In their defense, when Naoto joins in, although they do take a bunch of redos, they can actually make something good.
- Euphemia's cooking in Soul Nomad And The World Eaters is so bad that there is a body count associated with it. It is described as the rest of the cast as nothing short of biological warfare — Which turns into a Funny Aneurysm Moment once you've played the game through once and learned that Raksha was using her to develop a concentrated form of Scarlet Iago that was near-instantly fatal.
- The cooking contest in Breath of Fire 2. Not only do you have to get the ingredients (cockroaches, worms and flies) yourself, in the end you are forced to eat it all. Although I suppose this also has to do with the chef in question being a frog.
- According to one still shown during the credits of Professor Layton And The Curious Village, Flora may be this.
- The World Ends With You contains a subversion with the owner of Ramen Don, Ken Doi. At one point you see his restaurant is floundering due to the presence of a new rival, Shadow Ramen. Neku assumes it's because Ken's food isn't as good - and given he offers you a meal with a visible whole fish, one can understand why he thinks that. However, Ken is actually a brilliant chef; once Neku convinces him to cook something a little less unpleasant-looking, his business booms once again.
- Karen from the Mineral Town saga of Harvest Moon is also one of those, which doesn't stop her from entering the cooking contest every year.
- Maya, the waitress from Tree of Tranquility knows fine cuisine when she smells it (and really digs guys who can cook), but she's very bad at making it herself.
- In Metal Gear Solid 2. According to Raiden, Rosemary is one of these, giving a sigh of relief when he convinced her to book a reservation to a restaurant instead of cooking on their special day, visibly cringing in the CODEC screens when she brings the subject up. And even confides to Snake that rations taste better than her food!
- In a call back to this, in Metal Gear Solid 4 if you call someone at the right time they confide that Rose's cooking is still horrible. And she exclaims that she enjoys the terrible American Army Rations.
- In Evolution Worlds Gre Nade can use his food as a special attack. It damages the enemies and chops their stats.
- Tia, Maxim's childhood friend from Lufia 2.
- While she can make rice just fine, anything else Minori from Brass Restoration tries to cook falls squarely in the lethal category.
- El Fuerte from Street Fighter IV, as is proven when he mixes chanko stew and borscht to serve to E. Honda and Zangief after the tournament, with unpleasant results.
- Luca Trulyworth of Ar Tonelico II has literal abominations for her cooking, including a dish that knocks out two residents of her own Cosmosphere, two food-based Song Magics (one consisting of flinging food at the enemy, the other a food bomb), and hell, even what she does at Skycat's place is an abomination, e.g. the horrendous "Trulyworthit Soup" which still has fish bones and seaweed sticking out of it, her "Chalonde Trois" which looks somewhat like something from the mind of Lovecraft, to the okay "Baked Crackercake," which was meant to be a rollcake but somehow turned into a rice cracker. Jacquli may also count, but at least hers is meant to damage (such as the Bunny Roll, which happens to be a bomb that explodes once the bunny on top of it reaches the center).
- Aeon the chef in Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia is initially presented as this (his longest engagement was for three weeks ), but in the end he makes up for a subversion, since he CAN cook good meals (his miniquests unlock two of the best healing items in the game), he's just too much of a ditz to actually care for his costumers or the taste of his food. He still acknowledges his faults and promises to become a better chef, though.
- The Vice-Principal from Mana Khemia Alchemists Of Alrevis, during a School Festival, volunteered herself to work in a restaurant booth. The results were not pretty that the students were practically begging for the Principal to replace the Vice-principal's cooking.
- Not food per se, but Jess, a main character from the same game, is very fond of making medicine that are... Well, they're actually medicine in name only. Anyone unlucky enough to be her
volunteer guinea pig to taste the medicine are in for a world of hilarious hurt.
- Both Jason and Melissa in the beginning of the visual novel Songs Of Araiah. In Melissa's case, she's been eating her own horrible cooking for so long that she enjoys Jason's cooking (which would be lethal cooking by anybody else's standards. Both improve their skills to a degree by the end of the game.
- It's a video game series. From Japan. This is a Japanese trope. The Law of Very Large Numbers holds that there should be at least one Lethal Chef in the Suikoden games. The most prominent is Nanami, who even manages to incapacitate Nash with her cooking in one of the side games. (That doesn't stop one schoolgirl from asking Nanami for for cooking tips to impress a Celibate Hero; the advice ends with "take some bracing tincture and go at it like mad.")
- There's also an inversion with The Wise Prince Shams in Suikoden Tierkreis, whose taste buds have been murdered by his family's perpetually abyssmal taste. That's right: he only finds foods from a Lethal Chef appetizing.
Webcomics
Western Animation
- Futurama: Bender, being a robot, has no sense of taste and a limited knowledge of organic biology. As a result, he has trouble understanding why humans dislike food that only contains 90% of a lethal dose of table salt. He even ended up accidentally killing his Obi-Wan with a dish that made his stomach implode. One episode also featured aliens called Cygnoids, whose bizarre physiology and foreign culture led to many problems, including "wine" made from crushed rats.
Leela: "Oh, God! It's horrible."
Amy: "Bender, is this salt water?"
Bender: "It's salt with water in it, if that's what you mean."
Fry: "My vision's fading... I think I'm gonna die."
Bender: "There was nothing wrong with that food. The salt level was only ninety percent of a lethal dose."
Zoidberg: "Uh-oh. I shouldn't have had seconds."
- To be fair, right before his digestive tract went blooey, his Obi-Wan declared it "...acceptable."
- Fireman Elvis from Fireman Sam is a very fine example of this as the food would often get burned. This troper wonder what the heck Sam was thinking when he got him to be in charge of the BBQ.
- Granma Stuffems from Codename Kids Next Door is a very extreme example of this — the food is literally alive and acts as her helpers. And also that giant sandwich creature Slamwitch is one meal that could probably make a meal out of you.
- Lizzie, #1's girlfriend, could also qualify. When "Nigie" is sick, she makes him soup that he later uses as an explosive weapon. When he goes on a retreat in Jamaica, she follows with a pie she baked for him. One bite of the pie knocks the pilot unconscious. And then the replacement pilot.
- Invader Zim often jokes about the lethality of cafeteria food at The Skool, including missing livers if the kids are lucky.
- GIR is a more straitlaced example. One sentence: "These got peanuts and soap in 'em!".
- "Grammy" from Disney's Gummi Bears.
- Miss Mooshk from "Wayside".
- Grandpa Max from Ben10. While his cooking may not strictly be lethal, it's generally... rather strange and somewhat unappetizing. This is a Running Gag for the series. At one point, Max pulls a grubworm out from under a log at Yellowstone and eats it, much to the disgust of his grandchildren.
- Word Of God says that his cooking and appetite is a result of his extensive and extraordinary travels on Earth and outer space.
- X Men Evolution's Kitty Pryde is an example of this early on, (Her muffins either bounce off the walls or leave dents in the floor. Poor Kurt) but gets better as the series progresses. (Unless this is a contributor's mind going drawing even closer to insanity.)
- Jon Arbuckle, in Garfield And Friends, is frequently portrayed as a Lethal Chef; his "new recipes" are invariably end up as something that looks like it belongs in a low budget horror movie, although he is also usually capable of making normal food when he's not trying to get creative.
- On the other hand, sometimes he even fails at that. In one episode, Jon attempts to cook breakfast. With the Rule Of Three fully in effect, the first two food items he makes, which require actual contact with flame, catch fire. Jon then gives up and decides to have some cereal. When he pours milk on his cereal, it promptly catches fire.
- Wait... well, then where does Garfield get his lasagna?
- Well, that other troper did say "sometimes". I would imagine he gets plenty of practice on that particular dish.
- Inn The Movie (well, the second one) Garfield can make it himself, with a little help.
- In the first movie and at least two comics, it's frozen lasagna (straight out of the package).
- Squidward in Sponge Bob Square Pants seem to be something of a gourmet, and in at least one episode is seen eating an elaborate dish he prepared himself. When asked to sub for Spongebob at the Krusty Krab, however, all he manages to do is burn everything to a crisp.
- Likewise, one suspects the main reason Plankton is always trying to steal the Krabby Patty formula is because his own cooking is highly unappetizing. After all, how good can food from a place called the Chum Bucket be?
- Mr. Krabs was also shown making a terrible dinner once, which got alive and tried to eat him and some customers ("Squilliam Returns"). In the same episode we learn that he only cleaned the bathrooms on the S.S. Gourmet - but that he was the head chef on the S.S Diarrhea.
- Exploiting Spongebob being a celebrity cook ("The Krusty Sponge"), Mr. Krabs uses mouldy, yellowed patties for original "Spongebob"-patties, sold for a premium price - with disastrous side effects on the customers.
- Both of the girls on the Teen Titans are lethal chefs, but whereas Starfire might be a good cook by Tamaranean standards, Raven is just plain terrible. It does not cheer her up at all when the alien on the team is the only one who enjoys her pancakes.
- The boys don't fare much better. Beast Boy is a strict vegetarian whose dishes are 90% tofu, while Cyborg is an avid carnivore. Their fridge has a strange, blue, living substance in it (that apparently tastes quite nice).
- Heffer Wolf on Rockos Modern Life is a variation: while the meal he cooks for himself and Rocko in one episode tastes decent enough, it looks disgusting, is made from thoroughly unappetizing ingredients, and actually tries to crawl away from his plate at one point.
- Lunch Lady Doris from The Simpsons routinely serves truly abominable food to the students at Springfield Elementary. It's hard to tell whether she's such an awful cook because of apathy, malice, lack of talent, lack of access to edible ingredients ("more testicles means more iron!"), or an evil combination of them all.
- "Todays special is free-fried dogpoop."
- "There's very little meat in these gym mats."
- "Thanks to the latest round of budget cuts, we're down to using Grade F meat." (Ingredients: Mostly Circus Animals, Some Filler)
- Another episode of The Simpsons used the Jon Arbuckle formula above when Homer was attempting to cook breakfast for Mr. Burns. Everything he tried to make caught on fire (including corn flakes and milk).
- Once, Marge flashbacked to the last time Homer tried to cook for the family. He served fish that weren't quite dead. Don't get me started on the lobster.
- She can't be that great herself: "Eight spices? Some of those have to be doubles! 'Oregano'?"
- In the one time that Chowder decided to make a dish without the assistance of master chef Mung Daal, he accidentally dumped a whole bottle of poison in it, and then unknowingly tried to sell it on the streets. It even managed to burp out the warning "You... will... die!" when Mung was almost forced to taste-test it.
- Dave The Barbarian had an episode where Dave lived out his dream of running a bistro, the term "Lethal Chef" got taken to a new level when he used a cursed cookbook called "The Cuisinum Mysterium Cookbook" to help him — the recipes are cursed (the food comes alive and takes on a life of its own) and later on while making "Armageddon Souflé" the souflé comes to life and becomes a rampaging monster dessert.
- Arthur's grandmother probably wouldn't be such a bad cook if she weren't distracted by the other things she tries to do at the same time. (Buster Baxter gobbles her cookies right down, though.)
- His father, that grandmother's son, learned to cook early on, perhaps because of this. Of course, he's a good chef, but when he experiments, "Just try to guess / what's on your plate".
- Timmy's mother from Fairly Odd Parents. Don't worry, I'm sure she saved you some leftover cabbage casserole or some broccoli in gelatin brand gelatin.
- To elaborate on the subject, this woman's cooking is so bad, that it actually defies the laws of physics and collapses, becoming pink. In a black and white world.
- Parker in Mr Meaty , this has got to be the reason why the food there is always so terrible.
- In the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, the Turtles would put ridiculous combinations of things on their pizzas, such as "peanut butter and clams", much to April O'Neil's dismay. The Turtles themselves liked it, though.
- Catscratch has Gordon (being Scottish and all) but Waffle managed to do worse in the episode where he was asked to make the soup and used the wrong book- instead of using the recipe book he used the book of the dead and zombies rose from their graves because of this.
- Johnny Bravo has Pops, the owner of a local diner who uses all sorts of strange things in his dishes, including possums and bald eagles. When Johnny runs in desperate for hair gel because Mr. Kevin's triple-strength hair tonic has been discontinued and is nowhere to be found in town, Pops responds with a cheerful: "Sure! Mr. Kevin's is the main ingredient in my Five-Alarm Chili!"
- Ricky Sprocket has Ricky's mom.
- A slight twist was done in The Adventures Of Teddy Ruxpin. Everybody hated Grubby the Octopede's food, but that was because he always used tree root as a main ingredient: A favored taste for Octopede's but disliked by everybody else.
- A running gag in The Weekenders is Tino's mother "experimenting" with healthy foods...with disastrous results. Tino often tries to avoid getting a parental lecture by commenting on the food instead with comments questioning the ingredients and sometimes even implying that the food is alive.
- One episode of Recess has Gretchen talking about Tomato Surprise (no relation). She later uses the Tomato Surprise to destroy the hinges and the lock on a door so she and the rest of the gang can free TJ.
Gretchen: The tomato surprise isn't without it's useful properties.
TJ: You mean this stuff is safe to eat?
Gretchen: No. I mean if you let it age, it can burn a hole through a concrete floor.
Vince: (Inserts spoon into Tomato Surprise and it dissolves) It doesn't have too far to go.
- Subverted in the animated version of The Tick - The Breadmaster's baked goods (or as Tick puts it, "Baked Bads!") are intended to be dangerous (bread bombs that demolish buildings by expanding to enormous size, gingerbread men that rob banks,) although when Tick samples the first bread bomb, he comments, "This is actually quite good!"
- In The Replacements, about the only thing that omnicompetent superspy Agent K can't do is cook; in one episode her husband builds an indestructible house for the family's pet mule out of K's breakfast bars.
- A Mickey Mouse Works short, Mickey Tries to Cook has Mickey Mouse trying to cook something other than sandwiches, and ending up causing an explosion when he doesn't realize his fan is flipping the pages of his cook book when he isn't looking.
Book: Cut Carrots
Mickey cuts some carrots
Book now reads "Whole Carrots"
Mickey takes the cut carrots and glues them back together.
- While not a lethal chef per se, Johnny Test's father can only cook meatloaf and it's next to indigestible.
- In GI Joe, Heavy Duty takes this to another level; He likes to use grenades to barbecue. This is an intentional contrast to his cousin, world class chef and gourmet Roadblock.
- Pleakley in Lilo And Stitch The Series. He's pleased by the fact that dog food makes its own gravy.
- Chef Hatchet from Total Drama Island. While he sometimes make terrible food deliberately, as part of a challenge, his everyday cooking is not much better.
- The Peculiar Purple Pieman from Porcupine Peak from the 1980s Strawberry Shortcake. When on a cooking show, his own oven groaned at the thought of baking his cookies, and one taste of his entry had the judge calling for a doctor, an ambulance, and the marines. Fortunately, Strawberry's cooking was the antidote.
Real Life
- BUTLINS. 'nuff said.
- It's worth mentioning incorrectly prepared Fugu fish, which is literally lethal.
- Many tropers might fit into this. Some of them to the point that only the experimental food is edible.
- Deliberately Lethal Cookery has apparently become a pastime on several video sites, especially in Japan. Many chefs apparently have a code of ethics where they have to finish the food... Several examples follow.
- Every so often somebody gets overly-fond of nutmeg, or misreads the recipe. In one case, it actually was a lethal recipe-author who had missed that they'd used the wrong unit, and somebody actually followed the recipe exactly and ate it, with friends, and a subsequent trip to the hospital. The thing that amazed this troper's mother, who has been a professional cook, is that anybody could manage to eat food with that much nutmeg.
- A plausible explanation of this: in large doses nutmeg is a very potent deliriant with a bevy of psychotropic effects. They were probably quite aware of the horrible taste...
- NOVA 91.9 FM once ran a 'Munta Chef' contest to see who is the worst cook in Adelaide.
- Army MRE's are notorious for being so bad that one expansion of the acronym is "Meals Rejected by Ethiopians".
- According to Tom Clancy, "Meals Ready to Eat" is three lies for the price of one.
- This troper is reminded by the quote at the top of the page of a story her mother told her once... of the free-standing spiced apple cider that her friend once produced one winter many years ago.
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