Do you really want to mess with someone who knows where the knives are?
A Lethal Chef is someone whose cooking is so terrible that it could fall under the Geneva Convention as an inhumane weapon. A Supreme Chef is a superb cook, particularly the kind that participate in televised Cooking Duels where "every battle, reputations are put on the line."
Combine the lethal potential with sublime cooking skills and you get the Chef of Iron: a fighting cook, someone who can kick your ass and prepare a gourmet meal with equal ease. They are a bad person to have as an enemy but a good person to have invite you over to dinner.
Chefs of Iron fall into different, frequently overlapping types, not limited to:
"Ordinary" (or more ordinary than the following examples at least) people who are skilled in normal combat and mundane, if excellent cookery; one or the other tends to be his day job. If the day job is fighting (e.g. military, police work) being a cook may show the character has a sensitive side (sometimes a case of Real Men Wear Pink and/or Real Men Cook); if cooking is the day job, they may be leading a double life of hidden badass. Or, they might be a chef for an army or suchlike, where they do both at the same time. In this form, may overlap with the Almighty Janitor.
A cook whose special skills include using cooking implements in combat. They may be an Improbable Weapon User; there are many ways you can hurt people with boiling liquids, big chef's knives, eating utensils and cutlery, heavy skillets, etc. An angry Apron Matron brandishing a Rolling Pin of Doom at you may cross over into this trope slightly, especially if it's their primary means of defending themselves. Compare I Know Madden Kombat.
A chef for whom cooking is their means of fighting, and we're not talking about Cooking Duels. Baguette Beatdowns, entangling noodles, golems made of food, chemical weapons made from hot pepper sauce, the pantry's the limit. May be combined with kitchen implements as above. In this form, they are practicing Martial Arts and Crafts.
Such chefs' cooking style may involve Asian Cleaver Fever. May overlap with Evil Chef as a villainous version, and commonly overlaps with Real Men Cook. Compare Battle Butler.
Not to be confused with a certain culinary contest, in case you didn't bother checking out that pothole above.
