Cooking Duel

""Our world is a battleground into which only those who can bake truly good bread can enter.""

- Kai Suwabara, Yakitate!! Japan, a literal example.

This time, instead of fists, swords or overpowered fireballs, the combatants can find themselves squaring off through an impromptu contest in some sufficiently quirky task over a perceived slight to one's honor or that of a love interest. While Duels Decide Everything, in Anime anything can be a duel -- and in Comedy Series, it usually is. Especially when Kid Samurai and Heir to The Dojo characters with touchy senses of honor are involved. Alternatively, the Alpha Bitch could provoke a less excitable character into such a contest.

Just to be clear, does not have to actually involve cooking, it just has to be that silly.

Essentially, this is the Evasive Fight Thread Episode made silly with plenty of silly Trash Talk. In shows where the Cooking Duel is Serious Business, expect many a What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome? moment.

When it actually involves cooking, the female combatants of an Unwanted Harem will view it as the ultimate battle for the guy of their dreams. After all "the way to a man's heart is Through His Stomach." Hilarity Ensues as one or more of the girls are often Lethal Chefs, ESPECIALLY if she is the designated girl who will win the guy. But Supreme Chefs can be involved as well.

And of course, as anybody who regularly watches Food Network can tell you, there are also the shows that are literally nothing more than straight-up cooking duels between two people. And of course they originate from Japan. And, oddly enough, many of the above-described subtropes still apply (less the harem tendencies).

This can be hilarious when combined with Chess With Death.

Compare Chef of Iron.

Anime and Manga
"Akane: Cooking... Why does it always have to be cooking?"
 * Ranma ½ took about half of its plots from this trope, ranging from gymnastics to fast food sales to a "martial arts marriage contest" in one of the movies, almost all of which had their own ridiculous fighting style devoted solely to it. The hot-headed Ranma was easily maneuvered into such contests - even, memorably, a Cooking Duel to see who was more feminine. At least two were literal cooking duels that didn't involve any unlikely fighting techniques (though one did include some impossible use of cooking knives).


 * Digimon Xros Wars has one in Sweets Zone.
 * Similarily, Frontier has "You Want Fries With That." It's regarded as one of the best episodes, as it focuses on JP, Zoey, and Tommy who were otherwise forgotten.
 * Kujibiki Unbalance is set at a High School where the student body is set up in an enormous Tournament Arc of Cooking Duels. (The first of which is literally a cooking duel.)
 * The "Yamato Nadeshiko Cup" from Tenshi Na Konamaiki. Megumi and Genzo also fight an actual Cooking Duel at one point.
 * Yakitate!! Japan also tends to have Tournament Arcs that are also literal cooking, nay, baking duels.
 * Manga example: Jan Akiyama, from Iron Wok Jan, deliberately attempts to make everything around him into a Cooking Duel -- his catchphrase is "Cooking is about winning".
 * The game of tag that opens Urusei Yatsura.
 * Ginta vs. Tsutomu at tennis in Marmalade Boy (the loser had to shave his head).
 * Bistro Recipe, which was Macekred into Fighting Foodons by 4Kids Entertainment, combined the Cooking Duel with a Mons series, with the chefs summoning their previously-created "Foodons". Yes, it's as silly as it sounds.
 * Yu-Gi-Oh and Yu-Gi-Oh GX frequently stake the lives of the characters, or even the fate of the world, on a collectible card game.
 * And in the first seven manga volumes, a much crueler Yami Yugi would make these up on the spot to challenge anyone who pissed him off/hurt his friends with. They were typically much darker and dangerous than other examples of this trope (example: challenging a crooked shopkeeper to a contest of "draw the coins out of the sneaker with a deadly scorpion inside it").
 * Hikaru no Go likewise milks the traditional Japanese board game of go for all the drama they can get. In fairness, some people in Real Life make their living playing the game.
 * Akagi does with Mahjong what Hikaru no Go does with go, just with more Yakuza and crazy old men.
 * Ditto for Kaiji.
 * The Legend of Koizumi is a series in which world leaders battle over the fate of the world... WITH MAHJONG.
 * Sanji in the One Piece anime takes part in a few cooking duels. The original manga didn't feature any, though.
 * However, he did duel an enemy cook in the manga. Only, it was a real fight.
 * In one such duel, he manages to win, despite using only the ingredient scraps remaining from his opponent's recipes.
 * The infamous cabbage scene in Yoake Mae Yori Ruri Iro Na Crescent Love.
 * Spoofed in The Slayers, where the main characters must dress up in animal costumes and pass several ridiculous tests in order to reach the top of an enchanted tower, one of which is an actual cooking battle in which the mazoku Xelloss (who elects to flamboyantly clothe himself for the occasion in a frilly cap and apron) creates such a deliberately noxious concoction -- after all, it's a cooking duel, right? -- that he almost kills them all with the fumes, and then wonders why he loses even though he created exactly what he aimed for. The price of losing these contests is being turned into adorably chibified dolls, which is the sort of thing you grow to expect from this series. The characters tend to hang lampshades on this quite forcefully as they protest the unfairness (and the ridiculousness) of it all.
 * The other challenges fall in this category. The next one was an Octopus and a game of rock paper scissors...where the octopus did them all at once. The third was a game of tag, where you had to grab someone by the butt, and the opponent was a snake. That one was funny.
 * In NEXT Lina and Martina had a game of magic tennis for the prize. At least the game moved them to a truce and Xelloss got some tasty mayhem...
 * In Clannad, Fuuko and Sunohara engage in a wood carving duel.
 * Sasami entered a literal -- and televised -- cooking contest in volume 8 of the Tenchi Muyo manga. Her main opponent seemed to be somehow related to Kagato.
 * Prince of Tennis has no Cooking Duel, but it DOES have an entire mini arc devoted to an eating duel between the various rival teams.
 * Naruto had a literal Cooking Duel in one of its many, many Filler episodes.
 * In Chuuka Ichiban  (a.k.a. Cooking Master Boy), continuous Cooking Duels are not just Serious Business, they're also the main way of life for chefs in China, and can earn rising stars wealth, power and even political clout.
 * Galaxy Fraulein Yuna takes this to even sillier extremes: the opening scene is a literal cooking duel between giant mecha! The protagonist wins by cooking eggs by the heat of atmospheric re-entry.
 * Real Bout High School, an anime series about a school where all of the student clubs are dedicated to fighting with lethal weapons, features a Cooking Duel between the female leads for the affection of a male student.
 * An upcoming event in the Black Butler manga, in which the title Battle Butler Sebastian will face Funny Foreigner Battle Butler Agni in a curry competition.
 * Kannagi, from which the image above is taken, has a cooking contest between Nagi, Tsugumi, and Zange.
 * Some of Mahou Sensei Negima's first volume takes this approach to a dodgeball game.
 * Later on, the "Kiss Negi" competition treats a pillow fight this way, complete with a commentator.
 * Throughout the manga Oishinbo there are a number of Cooking Duels between the main character and his father or their proxies.
 * Constantly shows up in Kitchen Princess, both officially (that is, an actual cooking competition) and unofficially (pitting Najika against a professional chef to prove her spot in the special class, among others)
 * In one episode of Shichinin no Nana, Nanacchi and Hayashiba, Kogarashi, and Morinuma turn a make-up home ec class into one of these, with the loser being the winner's slave for a week.
 * In Yumeiro Patissiere, Ichigo and "The Heiress," Koshiro Miya, have a pudding baking competition to decide who gets to enter the Cake Grand Prix with the Sweets Princes.
 * This trope ultimately becomes an important plot point (albeit not at first).
 * Seto no Hanayome has an epic singing contest between Lunar and Sun. Their rival fan clubs turn the school into a war zone.
 * Shina Dark manages to make a Cooking Duel out of bartering.
 * Best Student Council has a curry rice battle between the Assault and Covert squads. Hilarity Ensues
 * Dear S had a cooking duel as part of a three-part contest between Myu and Ren to determine which of the two would be allowed to stay at the school said contest occured in. The first two parts were a running contest and a five subject test, so the latter did raise some questions until Myu explained that housework was part of a Dear S' indispensable skills.
 * An episode of Pokémon did this with a restaurant run by two sisters, who let their Pokémon do the cooking. One's Sneasel does it the old fashioned way, while the other's Mr. Mime does it using its powers. The Sneasel's food is delicious but looks terrible and is presented with no style, while the Mr. Mime's food looks amazing and the cooking is done with extreme flair, but in the end tastes wretched. In the end, they find a way to combine to two styles into one bigger, more successful restaurant.
 * An episode of Koihime Musou had an eating contest. And one of the participants was a professional eating competitor.
 * Another had a three-part duel which included intellect competition (designed for monkeys) and cosplay competition.
 * In Princess Tutu, nearly everything is decided by ballet (I bet you couldn't tell from the title). Many of the dances actually don't fall under this trope since they aren't duels, instead focusing on characters revealing their true feelings through dance. But there's several that do, including any sword fight in the series (which usually mixes ballet moves with sword fighting), and the first season's finale where the titular Magical Girl and her Dark Magical Girl rival end up dancing to determine who gains control of the Prince.
 * Koe De Oshigoto has an erotic voice acting contest (it's that kind of series) between Kanna and Fumika with one particularly timid and reserved colleague as their target. They themselves don't take too seriously, unlike resident Hot-Blooded pervert Sakanami, who suggested the whole thing in the first place.
 * Most of the battles in Gintama involve some form of this trope, including even some of the serious ones. Most notably, the Yorozuya, wallowing in poverty, can often be seen having over the top battles over hot pot or crab.
 * An Iron Chef-esque version of one happens on one episode of THE iDOLM@STER
 * Otome wa Boku Ni Koishiteru has a swim competition between Takako and Mariya. The event is scaled out of proportion by Kei.

Film

 * Taken to its extreme in God of Cookery, a spoof of a traditional Hong Kong martial arts movie substituting the fighting with cookoffs, including a climactic cookoff where the combatants fling magical fireballs at their food to make it cook faster.
 * In the Chinese movie Jin yu man tang or The Chinese Feast, the heroes fight the bad guys... in a cooking competition.
 * In Zoolander Derek and Hansel have a male-model runway competition patterned after a physical fight.
 * Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines: Duel by balloon and blunderbuss. Basically the opponents each take off in a gas balloon, and then try to shoot down the other's balloon with a blunderbuss.

Literature

 * One important plot element in the Apprentice Adept series by Piers Anthony is the main character contending to win the prize in a competition known simply as "The Game" or "The Tourney." The contestants could end up in any potentially competitive contest; it could be something as conventionally sportsmanlike as running a marathon, or something as seemingly undramatic as blowing soap bubbles. A lampshade is hung over any situation that calls for it, pointing out that the rules of the game involve an element of luck that can lead to unusual results. In at least one case (a "friendly," rather than part of the Tourney) it was an actual Cooking Duel, with humorous results given that neither contestant needed to eat, or had any idea what chocolate brownies were supposed to be like.
 * In Alan Dean Foster's Mad Amos short story Witchen Woes, Mad Amos has a literal Cooking Duel (a chili cookoff) with a kitchen witch as a kind of exorcism.
 * In Patricia C Wrede's short story Utensile Strength, the characters hold a bake-off to determine the rightful wielder of the Frying Pan of Doom.
 * The best part about that was when the the big, manly fighters/knights/barbarians insist on finishing the duel because they were "really looking forward to it." The one man's chocolate cake made with a helmet and baked in a shield is actually delineated in his own words in the back of the collection, parenthetically translated for modern-style cooking of course.
 * In the Star Trek Expanded Universe novel How Much For Just The Planet? by John M Ford, Scotty gets challenged to a duel by a Klingon security officer. He chooses "the ancestral weapon of the Scots" -- that is, golf.

Live Action TV

 * Numerous Game Shows and Reality Shows are more or less entire series of literal Cooking Duels -- in live action, to boot.
 * Iron Chef (which is technically the Trope Codifier) and its Americanized Spin-Off Iron Chef America
 * Top Chef
 * Food Network runs or has run several other Cooking Duel-based shows, such as Throwdown, where Bobby Flay challenges another famous chef at his own specialty, and Date Plate, where two guys compete for a date with a hot woman by cooking her dinner.
 * Master Chef in Britain and Australia. Cooking doesn't get tougher than this!
 * Ready Steady Cook (Ready.. Set... Cook! in the USA) - Debuted in Britain in 1994, USA in 1995, independant of any Iron Chef populairty (1993 in Japan, then to the USA a few years later). Two chefs each team up with a normal person, receive a mystery bag of ingredients and have to prepare a meal with it.
 * And Chopped which takes the secret ingredient concept from Iron Chef and multiplies it.
 * The I Carly episode "iCook" has a parody of these shows complete with an Expy of Bobby Flay who has a nervous breakdown when he loses.
 * Numerous reality shows, like America's Next Top Model, would also fit this trope.
 * The Brady Bunch had several of these, frequently between the boys as a group and the girls as a group.
 * The second season finale of Chef! was about a multi-participant cookery contest. Gareth cooked for England!
 * An episode of The Colbert Report featured an amazing dance-battle-turned-Dance Dance Revolution game between Stephen Colbert and his archnemesis, Korean pop singer Rain.
 * Tendo Souji was not only the title character and The Ace of Kamen Rider Kabuto, but also a genius chef. Naturally, this meant that any feud he had with another character would inevitably come down to a cooking duel. A short two-episode arc called "The Dark Kitchen" took this premise to its logical, yet highly absurd conclusion.
 * Then there's that make-up duel between Kazama Daisuke and a rival make-up artist. It's hilarious. Daisuke won by doing the impossible:
 * Also note this was a Single-Stroke Battle - they each did a makeup job on the other in a fraction of a second while leaping past each other.
 * Also, in Real Life, Kamen Rider Black star Tetsuo Kurata is a master steak chef, beating Kamen Rider Blade star Takayuki Tsubaki in an episode of a cookoff show.
 * Kamen Rider W did this in their Hyper Battle Video. Philip was hungry and the enemy was food-based, so his 3 allies had a cooking duel with him as the judge to find out what the enemy was made of. The announcer from Iron Chef was there as a gadget giving commentary. Notably, none of this made any logical sense at all (but then, the Hyper Battle Videos are non-canon anyway.)
 * Another Toku example, Tama-chan and Chukaen's cook-off in Tomica Hero Rescue Fire Episode 10.
 * The Mamas Family episode "Soup to Nuts" features Thelma, Naomi, and Iola competing to see who cooks the best chili.
 * The Odd Couple episode They Use Horseradish, Don't They? had Oscar helping Felix in a cooking contest when Felix's back went out due to the stress of the competition.
 * More on the silly side and less on the dramatic, the various contests on Top Gear could qualify. Jeremy, James, and Richard will take part in competitions involving cars that often involve some odd regulations, such as "You are given £2000 to spend on a car and insurance as if you are 17 and buying your first. You are then to drive to X location while asserting why your car is better, spend the remainder of your money on modding your car to make it cooler, drive up to "your parent's house" at night without waking them, and impress some teenage girls with a handbrake turn. Whoever has the most points at the end wins."
 * To say nothing of the time presenter James May appeared on Gordon Ramsay's The F Word, engaged Ramsay in an actual cooking duel, and won.
 * He drank what appeared to be an entire bottle of wine, to boot.
 * The show Future Food has a competition in every episode.
 * On Parks and Recreation health-conscious Chris tries to convince unrepentant carnivore Ron that taking hamburgers off the menu was a good idea. Ron dares him to prove it, so they have a cook-off; Chris' turkey-burger with fancy herbs and spices versus Ron's ordinary beef patty on a plain bun, ketchup optional. Everyone actually likes Chris' turkeyburger, but then they have one bite of Ron's burger and all agree that it's better, even Chris.

Tabletop Games

 * Monkey Ninja Pirate Monkey, using the Prose Descriptive Quality system by Atomic Sock Monkey can take almost anything into a duel, and even uses a cooking contest as an example.
 * The Changeling: The Lost sourcebook Swords at Dawn details the various types of duels the Courts use to resolve disputes, split along lines of Physical, Mental, Social, and Mystical. Sure, two members of the martial Summer Court could engage in a fist-fight to first blood... but they could also easily decide on a duel where each argues a case before an impartial judge and tries to make the best argument.
 * Feuds between samurai in Legend of the Five Rings are typically solved with whatever skill the parcipants are trained in - swords for bushi, magic for shugenja and so forth. However, as samurai are expected to have knowledge in the courtly arts, the challenger may suggest more or less whatever he or she likes. Thus one can settle a feud through a flower-arranging battle. This does tend to cost the challenger some face, though, as onlookers think less of their martial abilities.
 * In RISUS, anything can be a "fight", explicitly so, as long as it's entertaining or funny.
 * Dungeons and Dragons Oriental Adventures campaign setting has a rule for official and unofficial contests in any proficiency appropriate for the situation, such as calligraphy or falconry. Winning or losing such challenges gives or takes a Honor point and the winner receives XP bonus proportional to the host's level, doubled for official competitions.
 * Unknown Armies wants players to realize just how dumb engaging in lethal violence can be and suggests methods to avoid it. One of those, Rechannel, involves substitution of another competition for violence. The main book suggests drinking contests, cards, scavenger hunts, arm wrestling - really, anything with a clear winner and loser can do. Imagine the GM when a character offers to settle a feud with an NPC with winner-takes-all Hungry Hungry Hippos.

Theatre

 * Older Than Radio: In Gilbert & Sullivan's The Grand Duke, there is a "statutory duel", whereby the winner is determined by playing a children's card game.
 * Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street features a shaving duel. "The fastest, smoothest shave wins!"

Video Games

 * The Playstation game Suikoden II included a minigame with cooking duels between your army chef Hai Yo and various wandering chefs, including the two army chefs from the first Suikoden game. Complete with the twirling of weapons, the leaps of agility, and the bursts of energy from some of the opponents.
 * Along with deadly poisons, forbidden recipes, and secret societies.
 * You can play a Cooking Duel minigame in Star Ocean the Second Story's amusement park city, complete with a "secret ingredient" revealed with much fanfare.
 * Including a battle with slime as the secret ingredient.
 * In Tales of Symphonia, there's an optional scene towards the end of the game in which Regal has a cooking battle with "The Dark Chef" and earns his "God of The Kitchen" title.
 * Tales of Vesperia also gets one of these, putting the party member of your choice up against Flynn to earn cooking titles for your party members.
 * A character with a high enough Wisdom in Neverwinter Nights Tales of Arterra can bypass one test by telling the one-handed evil spirit who has been instructed to prove his is better than you that you are better at clapping your hands than he is.
 * This concept is sent up in one of Etna's highly inaccurate previews of the next episode in Disgaea, with the Prinny Squad as the secret ingredient.
 * Before Nippon Ichi hit it big with games like Disgaea, they made a whole game based on literal cooking duels called Cooking Fighter.
 * Cooking Mama allows one to duel in head-to-head mode on the NDS.
 * Parappa the Rapper kind of revolves around this. In each level, the titular rapper resolves a problem by rapping against a "master"--but they're all things that have nothing to do with rap. In the first game, you have to all by rapping. Only the last one makes any sense.
 * Speaking of Parappa, a Japanese commercial had him competing with Crash Bandicoot by playing this trope straight. It's delightfully amusing.
 * In Breath of Fire II, Princess Petape comes up with the idea to expose the impostor posing as her brother Tapeta by having the two engage in a Cooking Duel. The player's involvement in this consists of plumbing a dungeon to gather the ingredients.
 * One of the scenarios in Elite Beat Agents is Chinese Chef Lau Pai Pai going up against French Chef Jean Pulori in an Iron Chef ... Cheff... ..off.. thing. With Leonardo da Vinci as host and judge.
 * In fact, all of the multiplayer scenarios in Ouendan and EBA could count as this trope, as well as a few singleplayer levels in both Ouendan games.
 * The cooking themed game, Order Up!
 * Then there's the Monkey Island series. No, not those duels. This is about the . The kicker?
 * Many of the text-based mini-quests in Space Rangers can be seen as this. They're not always one-on-one duels (usually it's a four-way contest), but when a planetary government asks you to win a pizza-baking contest on some far away planet...
 * Both Megaman Battle Network 4 and Megaman Battle Network 6 include various cooking minigames, both of which involve using a the help of the main character's Personal Net Navi in the creation of delicious dishes. We are lead to believe that they are quite tasty.
 * Mario Party, anyone? Where to start: Don't look in the same direction as the opponent, blow a balloon between opponents' cars, walk on a ball and bump into the other to throw them away from the platform, shake a soda, and so on.

Web Comics

 * Triangle and Robert features "cuisine magic", so literal cooking duels are actually a regular feature of the strip.
 * Collar 6: A spanking contest.
 * Darths and Droids in this strip, which features a Force Arm-wresting challenge (which does not involve any actual arm-wrestling). And of course, The Rant links to this page.
 * ''Nectar of the Gods is a prime example of this during its Tournament Arc. As the whole tournament is a bunch of Cocktail Battles between two bartenders at a time, for a large prize along with huge amounts of recognition.
 * The webcomic Great has the main character's quest to create the greatest ramen ever.

Western Animation
"Brendon: Oh. It looks like we're gonna have to complete the fight without weapons!
 * In an Anvilicious episode of the 70's Fat Albert and The Cosby Kids, Fat Albert participated in a cooking contest. In a shocking (for the time) display of Positive Discrimination, Albert was continually denigrated, insulted, and generally made fun of by the other competitors (all girls, of course). In accordance with the episode's Aesop that anyone can do anything if they want it bad enough and work hard to get it, Fat Albert wins.
 * Pucca has cooking duel death courses, restaurant fights, and otherwise a whole new level of passion for the culinary arts.
 * Spongebob SquarePants once faced Poseidon in a Cooking Duel to see if Spongebob was really of "the Golden Spatula". The challenge: be the first to make 1000 Krabby Patties. Poseidon uses his magical powers to make Krabby Patties by the hundreds, while Spongebob just carefully makes one. It turns out Poseidon's patties taste horrible, and the one Spongebob made was the best Poseidon had ever had. There's probably a lesson in there somewhere about "quality over quantity"...
 * The difference between the patties was that Spongebob cared for his patty (literally, tucking it into a lettuce bed and everything) and Poseidon used his magical god-of-the-sea merman powers to whip up a thousand patties as quickly as possible. So it's more like a cooking aesop where love = good food, processed meats produced cheaply in large quantity = icky food, even if they look the same.
 * I shall never eat fast food again.
 * The episode "Fry Cook Games" has Spongebob and Patrick compete in fry-cooking themed athletic events like ice-cream high-diving and bun wrestling.
 * Avatar: The Last Airbender - in "Tales of Ba Sing Se", Sokka gets knocked into a poetry class and ends up in a haiku duel with the teacher. Which, stylistically, he treats as a rap battle.
 * An episode of the ALF Spin-Off Alf Tales changes John Henry from a steel-drivin' man to a celebrity chef who competes against a machine that synthesizes food.
 * Yet another Spongebob SquarePants ep tells the same story.
 * In Futurama, Bender is an aspiring chef. Unfortunately as a robot he has no taste buds and is appalling. But once he entered into a chef duel with the famous Elzar, and won by using a magical ingredient. It was ordinary tap water...
 * Courage the Cowardly Dog had Courage facing off with a demon that possessed Muriel...with thumb war.
 * Katz will do this sometimes too. In one episode, he and Courage had an epic duel to the death... in the form of a Staring Contest.
 * This seems to be Katz whole schtick. I'm pretty sure there is another episode where they have an overly-dramatic handball competition.
 * In the comic strip Lucky Luke: Calamity Jane from 1967, Jane gets involved in a baking contest with the equally unqualified matron of the establishment, the unlucky witnesses have to eat the results at gunpoint.
 * This makes up much of the plot of the second Strawberry Shortcake special ("...in Big Apple City").
 * Total Drama Island has a cooking challenge between the teams as one of its early challenges. Naturally, Hilarity Ensues.
 * Xiaolin Showdown is a very prominent example. A Showdown can be anything: a race, sumo wrestling, basketball, bird-catching, alligator-hopping, etc. Showdowns also take place in a warped, tricked-out version of wherever the characters were standing to make things interesting.
 * South Park has had dance-offs, whore-offs, virtual Yahtzee, and the "Hell's Kitchen Nightmares Iron Top Chef Cafeteria Throwdown Ultimate Cookoff Challenge," among other crap (literally).
 * Home Movies - Brendon and Jason play an attorney and his romantic rival who first square off with plastic swords, which break, so naturally...

Jason: You mean a battle of wits?

Brendon: Close...we fight with jazz!

Jason: Bring it on, daddy-o!"


 * The Simpsons parodies this mercilessly in the Hell's Angels episode; when Homer challenges the leader of the bikers to a motorcycle duel, they literally pick up their motorcycles and have a swordfight, complete with copious Flynning and dueling up and down stairs.