This Chef Gives Fine Dining a Hyrulean Twist as He Tries Cooking for Princess Zelda

It’s not everyday one has the privilege to cook for royalty, and even less often one cooks for fictional royalty. However, chef and YouTube personality Tone LoKe (a.k.a. Downward Thrust) placed the challenge upon himself as part of his Food Gaming Show — a series of coming up with classy restaurant dishes for icons of fiction to eat. For his third challenge in the series, he took on the Princess of Hyrule, Zelda.

For his dish, Tone went with crispy medium-well duck, with a side of beet-infused gnocchi, seared pumpkin, and a ricotta puree sauce. As a pretty avid chef myself, hearing Tone list out the menu for the princess gave me the impression he had quite an eye (or shall I say tongue) for flavor palettes and seeing his practiced procedure only backed that assertion up. I had the chance to actually reach out to him and see what exactly fueled his thought process.

Let’s start with off with an introduction, who are you and how exactly did your channel get started?

“My name is Tone Loke. My channel began in 2016. I started off with video essays, doing videos and commentary on video games. In 2019, I got the idea to start a cooking show inspired by old Food Network shows, and it merged with my love of video games. I got the idea to create a show where I try to cook for various video game characters if they ordered at a restaurant. This tends to be a bit difficult as we don’t often see characters eat or go to the bathroom, so I try to specifically take cues for characters that have some sort of connection in that way, like in my video with Geralt from The Witcher, we focused really heavily on the idea of a hunter’s feast.”

What originally inspired you to become a content creator exactly?

“I originally went to school for business, studying in Economics, and went for an MBA in Finance. After 8 years in school, I got my first job as a big professional gig in a suit and tie, 9-to-5, and I just realized this wasn’t for me at all. I wasn’t happy and I didn’t really feel what I was doing. I actually wrote my first YouTube script while I was on lunch at my workplace and it started off as a secret way back in 2016. Coworkers would ask and I would just say ‘Ah yeah, I’m just working on something.’ I began with hardly any subscribers in the beginning, just kind of whittling away at things. “

In the video description, you mention Zelda is one of your favorite series, what’s your history there? Which was your first game and which is your favorite?

“My family has a rich history with video games. I actually started with Zelda II: The Adventure of Link before my brother and I realized ‘Oh wait, this is a series!’ and we actually went back to play through the original. Around the time the Playstation came out, I actually went Sony and my brother went Nintendo for quite awhile, so a lot of my time was there on those older Zelda titles. Funny enough, Majora’s Mask is actually my favorite though, along with Ocarina of Time. I just really love the time mechanic and the darkness in that game.”

What made you go with the dish that you did in the video? I can imagine a lot of folks would’ve gone with a dish that was actually featured in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but you went with something completely different. How did each of those component come together?

“So the point of my show really, is what would this character order at a restaurant? While we look a lot at food in the games, I wanted to approach things more from who is the character. There are a lot of ideas of cooking food from games, but writing food for that character is a more unique idea. As far as Zelda goes, she’s rather underrepresented in the games and that made for a really hard challenge here. Zelda is something I really wanted to talk about, but I found it hard to find anything on her. It was hard to come up with something that represented her, and I didn’t want to go with a cop-out of a dish from the game because that’s the food Link eats, not Zelda. So I went back and thought about what a princess or pharaoh would eat back in the day.

“I started with just the gnocchi and that was all it was gonna be, but after we tested it, it seemed a bit lacking. This is where we started incorporating the protein, so in thinking about this, I thought about with pharaohs, there was often ‘the hunt’ where some game animal was brought in, and that’s where the duck came in. So with that, we then threw in the pumpkin in incorporating the fall season and the huge prevalence of root vegetables as ingredients in Breath of the Wild, and then finally a sauce to tie it all together. Out of the four people we cooked for, Zelda was by far the hardest. We had to take five different attempts at it before we actually got it right.”

The end result is nothing short of mouth-watering, featuring a beautiful arrangement on the plate showcasing the succulent duck and colorful varieties of sauces. The dish easily meets the royal standards of the Princess of Hyrule and given Tone’s sigh of satisfaction at the end; it sounds like it tastes just as good as it looks. As he explained to me though, it comes at a cost.

“You don’t get to see a lot of the screw-ups. That plate of food alone was at least $100.00 worth of food, and that’s not even accounting for the food waste involved in trying to cook while filming. Still, I’m glad we did it.”

You can check out Tone’s YouTube channel for the rest of his cooking challenges as well as video game reviews and commentary. You can also find updates on his work on his Twitter.

What do you think of the dish prepared for Princess Zelda? What dish would you prepare faced with the same challenge? Let us know in the comments below!

Emi Curtis

Emi Curtis is an associate editor with Zelda Dungeon, having originally joined the team in late 2020. She is a freelance artist, programmer, and streamer with a healthy love of both the creative and analytical. She can frequently be found playing RPGs and Adventure games, her favorite of which being The Wind Waker. She is also quite fond of playing Zelda Randomizers. Currently, she hosts a tabletop RPG series on Twitch and operates a freelance illustration business. She can be found on Twitter and Twitch as her VTuber alter-ego Gwen Myoty, creating nerdy artwork, dungeon mastering tabletop games, and playing RPGs.