• Access: Kitchen, Morgue
• Additional Access: Hydroponics, Bar
• Difficulty: Easy
• Supervisors: Head of Personnel
• Subordinates: Sous Chef, Line Cook, Waiter
• Duties: Make food, nag at hydroponics to grow you stuff, make meat from the odd lifeforms found in the morgue
• Guides: Guide to food and drinks
• Quote: No, officer - I'm using their corpses for food.

You cook food, blend veggies and fruits, grind bodies for meat, stick monkey and xenos onto meat hooks for meat… and occasionally gib larger prey for more meat.

Bare minimum requirements: Make sure there's always some food on your counter, in case a hungry crewmember comes by.

The first chef to join the shift starts with a speckled coat, a nice jumpsuit and a cool chef hat like in those movies. Any other cooks that join later will have a chef's apron and a white cap. Chefs get a lot of cool kitchen related things, too:

• A machine that can dispense trays, plates, cups, bowls, rolling pins and knives.
• 2 microwaves.
• A Smart Fridge.
• A hallway-facing counter with shutters.
• Rolling Pin.
• Blender, Juicer, and Processor.
• 2 Meat Spikes
• A gibber.
• Ice cream cart.
• Eggs.
• Meat.
• Flour.
• Rice.
• Sugar.
• Universal Enzymes.

Cooking is mostly done by putting ingredients on a table and see what you can cook with it through table crafting (click and drag the table onto you to open the window). Certain types of dishes also allows you to make custom food (pies, cakes, …) by directly adding ingredients on the dish. You will at times need the processor or microwave, a beaker, a knife and a rolling pin to prepare some raw ingredients (e.g. mix flour & water to get dough); check the cook book on the kitchen table for more info.

Trying to microwave random food (as opposed to a recipe) will make it dirty and unusable until it gets a spray of space cleaner. If a microwave gets broken, you need to use a tool box set to repair it (using the tools inside, don't smack it more). The processor and the blender are much more forgiving. The processor will only take things that it recognizes and the blender will blend any food item (granted, you might not get anything interesting out of it). You also have a ChemMaster to separate and identify anything you produce with your blender.

In SS13, there is a good variety of foodstuffs that you can make, such as cakes, pizzas, ice creams, and many others. Usually, edibles will heal people for a small amount. This is all some food, like bread slices, are good for.Some food, however, may actually be graded in how tasty it is. Besides a small message showing up along the lines of “this tasted amazing”, a larger amount of health can be regained by eating high-quality food. Nowadays, foods can even give temporary buffs, and better food gives more and better buffs; thanks to your Kitchen Training trait, you can Examine food to determine its buffs and quality. Many players are willing to play along, so having an amazing tasting cake could, for example, prompt the captain to throw money at you, while an awful one can end up being thrown on your face.

Ingredients aren't really important to how a food taste, usually, as long as you are following the recipe. What is really important is the procedure (which usually means cooking time). So, it is worth it to experiment with the recipes. If something tastes bland, try cooking a little more, or a little less. Not all recipes are subject to this aspect (bread slices, for example, always taste the same), but many are.

A few of the recipes, like the pizza or the cake, will allow you to insert some ingredient or other of your choice. Once you have cake batter, for example, you can mix it with almost any foodstuff, as long as it will fit the mixer. Furthermore, you can also put any liquid in the icing tube to use as icing. So, you can have cakes varying from the normal, like chocolate cake with coffee icing, to unusual, like meat cake with cheese icing, to the nonsense, like steam ice cream cake with ice icing. Besides the decorative aspect, the ingredients you use will remain active, and affect whoever eats it. Be aware that anyone can check what these dishes are made off by just examining them. Experiment and see what you can stuff into different foods!

If you fuck up a recipe, you'll typically end up with a ????? or smoldering mess, either of which gives whoever's dumb enough to eat it food poisoning (although the reagent you extract from it can be useful for certain chemical recipes).

You should be cooperating with the Bartender or any Waiters to serve your patrons. If you don't want to go through the bartender and the Waiter hasn't shown up, you can use the window that faces the main hallway, serve patrons in person with your food carts, or even add your superior creations to vending machines.

The knife and the rolling pin on your table are invaluable in making food. You can cut cheese very easy with the knife, slice foods like pizza and cakes, and prepare other foods (test what you can cut with it). Some animals can be butchered with the knife as well. The rolling pin, meanwhile, is used to flatten certain ingredients, such as dough.

Other than that, they are also weapons! The knife, in particular, is an excellent melee weapon. Tinker with your vending machines, and you can get even stronger knives!

Your neighbor, hydroponics, is a necessity for you to make most recipes. Take a gander at the window early on and see if there are any botanists working, and if there aren't any inside, wait a bit for one to be sent on the arrivals shuttle or go ask the Head of Personnel for botany access so that you can grow your own plants. They will most of the time grant you access because hydroponics isn't a high-risk area. Good things to ask the botanists for to start with are wheat, tomatoes, and potatoes. These three plants are used commonly in recipes, and after you ask botany for those you can ask them for other plants when they need to be used in a recipe. Please note that hydroponics has direct access to your smart fridge, and will often times load crop into it without saying a word. Check it from time to time to see if the hippies have left you anything.

If no one is working botany and you're too lazy to stop by the Personnel office, the Garden has some basic produce available (most usefully, wheat) and the ability to make more seeds, assuming no one's ransacked it.

You can grab monkeys and force them onto your meatspikes to slaughter them instantly. Clicking on a meatspike with a monkey will remove their skin first, then provide a slab of meat for up to five times. Monkeys can be produced by adding water to a monkey cube; monkey cubes can be produced with the biogenerator or ordered in a supply crate.

Some precautions should be taken when handling Monkeys. Monkeys swipe any weapon they come across, i.e. kitchen knives, and react with extreme violence when grabbed or attacked in general. Do not grab a monkey with a knife. If you do, a few seconds later you will earn multiple new stab wounds. A few seconds later you will be running for medbay, trailing blood. A few seconds later an enraged knife-wielding monkey will follow you. It will not stop until either you or it are dying. See how bad it is? What's worse, you could end up with entire mob of extremely aggressive monkeys that are out for your blood if you try to grab or attack of monkey in front of a group of them.

Some critters can be gibbed with your knife for meat, but they need to be dead first. Try not to kill Pete, as it is able to eat Space vines if alive.

Surgery can allow you to remove brains and appendixes from some lifeforms. You can use these organs as ingredients in a few recipes.

Your gibber is EXCESSIVELY useful during long rounds where you are feeding a lot of people. If you can't get monkeys or other sources of meat, you can head off to the morgue. That's right, the cook has morgue access to grab spent bodies and drag them to the gibber. Examining dead bodies can tell you more about them: suicides, literally brainless bodies and bodies with their souls departed cannot be cloned, so gibbing them is usually okay. Your gibber can only accept unclothed bodies, so remove any clothing or other objects the body may have on them.

If you enjoy freedom, you can cook things by putting them in the deep fryer. Even objects that aren't normally edible can sometimes be fried and then eaten. To use the deep fryer, put something in it. The fryer will emit a sound after a short while. Remove the item by clicking on the fryer again. The fryer will transfer more reagents to the food item the longer it is fried. The fryer starts out with 25 units of Nutriment which will eventually need to be replaced.

If you have an aggressive grip on someone you're pulling, you can click on the fryer to stun and deal burn damage equal to the amount of reagents in the fryer. This will also splash half of the reagents onto the victim, which can hurt even more if you can get your hands on something more potent than Nutriment…

R&D can upgrade your microwaves, doubling the amount of food they produce! On long shifts with lots of people this will prove invaluable, assuming all the scientists haven't set themselves on fire.

Close your door behind you when you enter the kitchen. If you leave your door open when you come in, a murderer can run in and quickly stab you with a pen, take your ID, and throw you in your own gibber before you can say “BORK BORK BORK!” If people are trying to break in regardless, close the shutters over the tables.

All food contains the universal ingredient called “Nutriment.” It's what nourishes you and heals your injuries when you eat. Although food might not heal you as quickly as the doctor can (or from the more exotic dangers of the ship), it can often heal for more over time. Blending down a bunch of donuts and burgers into a nice nutriment shake can be just the right pick-me-up after having the shit beat out of you.

Healthy foods also contain “Vitamin” which heals you better and can strengthen your metabolism against viruses and harmful chemicals as well as increase the effect of medicine on you.

You can put your healthy food inside snack vending machines so players have more food choices.

Combining Blood and Synthflesh will generate meat in the reaction; Chemistry can sometimes be your greatest supplier.

Kitchen knives and cleavers can be stored on your Apron, and knives are small enough to fit in your pockets as well.

Don't waste monkeys by instantly tossing them on a spike! With your cleaver, a knife and some tools, you can easily perform ghetto surgery for that sweet brain cake.

You can color eggs with crayons.

You can make colored burgers by adding a crayon of your choice to the ingredients.

You can put a tray on your belt. They can carry up to 7 items of tiny or small size, making them more versatile (but bulkier) than toolbelts or fanny packs.

• A decent amount of food you can cook will actually cause damage. Some notable examples include:
  • Fish & Chips, Fish Fingers, and Carp Sashimi are all fairly toxic.
  • Enchiladas and Nettle Soup are both potentially deadly if consumed in full, dealing huge amounts of burn damage. However, nettle soup also contains omnizine which may heal the damage.
  • Amanita Jelly, Jelly Burgers, and even just raw Slime Jelly is incredibly lethal in mere moments, making it not a bad option for some force-feeding.
• When you gib a human, the meat is marked with their name (Adeline Lacon-Meat), so be careful not to leave it lying around, or people might start to ask questions.
• You can stash items in bread and a few other foods, so you can facilitate prison breaks by sending up tools, an emag, or even a small weapon to your buddies in the Prison Wing.

The chef is rather suited to Antagonist roles. Few people will query a chef dragging a corpse, and even fewer will actually care about the corpses/human meat in your kitchen. The gibber provides an excellent (and tasty!) way to dispose of your foes permanently.

Plus, Chef is a good role for evil fun with chemicals. The vending machines (especially the ones with Discount Dan's) and drink dispensers should yield enough nasty reagents to work with, and the Bar's suite of chemistry equipment (including a chem dispenser!) will get you quite far if you have the knoweldge. Combine it with access to Hydroponics, which you can likely reasonably obtain from the Head of Personnel under guise of growing more ingredients, and (almost) the entire world of chemistry is at your grasp. Inject your food with horrible poisons! Make treats that kill people in seconds! Create horrible deep-fried monstrosities!

On the other hand, the lack of access can be quite a handicap. Since you don't get Maintenance access and thus (usually, depends on the map) can't get into Tool Storage, you'll have to get a little creative to obtain tools or building materials for your nefarious schemes. Plus, some people are pretty suspicious of a Chef who's not in their kitchen…

Le Cordon Rouge: Traitor Chef As Traitor Chef, you get a solid selection of job-specific Syndicate gear. There are items for going loud and messy, items that let you fly under the radar and commit crimes without venturing too much from your expected job duties, and items for doing just plain silly shenanigans that could only happen in SS13.

One of the things you can order as a Traitor is an intimidating butcher's knife, which is quite powerful and causes a target hit by it to bleed everywhere. As a bonus, any dead person you hit with the knife will be gibbed and turned into meat for easy body removal! For flashier killing sprees, there's the pizza sharpener, a special pizza cutter that makes pizza into deadly throwing weapons!

Speaking of meat, the syndicate hotdog cart lets you get plenty of it from your victims. It'll turn anyone inside it into a meatcube, which eventually explodes into delicious cube steaks. The process also makes some hotdog sausage and drops all their internal organs, including brains and hearts, for human offal dishes. It looks pretty close to real hot dog cart too, and if you climb inside it, it won't hurt you, allowing you to potentially fool people into thinking it's a perfectly innocuous cart.

If rampages aren't your style, spice up the burgers of unsuspecting patrons with special, highly deadly syndicate sauce. Failing that, the amanitin in the sauce is a good stealth poison and goes well in sleepy pens.

If you're just into pranks, consider hotdog bombs, tiny bombs that give people embarrassing hot dog suits. Detonate them near breaches and force people to wallow through the cold! Throw one the Captain or Head of Security and laugh at their now armor-less and very unfashionable ass!

Finally, there are Syndicate Donk Pockets boxes. They contain Syndicate donk pockets, which gives you a powerful anti-stun and healing cocktail when eaten (i.e. no extracting the reagents). Eat one when you're in critical condition, and you'll be back to full health in a short while. Plus the anti-stun drugs can help you get an upper hand on an attacker, or at least run off and escape, though you might want something stronger for rampages. You can also feed them to any fellow traitors you've teamed up with or your mindslaves! Reasonably cheap, and a real bargain since you get seven of them in each box. Best of all, you don't even need to heat them to get their benefits, unlike regular donks.