Delco chef Kevin ‘Steek’ Cooper wins the keys to operate a Guy Fieri chicken shop

There’s stress and there’s stress.

Chef Kevin “Steek” Cooper of Drexel Hill was all revved up to compete on the Food Network show Guy’s Chance of a Lifetime last year when he and his wife, LaToya, learned that she had to start treatment for cancer.

Once in Orlando at the taping, still processing that news, Cooper learned that his sister Kedisha had died.

But the Steek Cooper that Guy Fieri and the TV audience saw over the last six weeks was a seemingly cool and calm chef — an Army veteran from North Philadelphia — who proved that he could operate a Fieri-branded fast-food eatery called Chicken Guy. Sunday night on the finale, Cooper was announced the winner, which means that Cooper will own and operate a Chicken Guy in the Philadelphia area.

Chicken Guy has two locations in the Nashville area and three in Florida, plus two satellite locations in stadiums. Cooper said he is not sure of his location, but expects to get more information now that the show’s outcome is known.

How does someone just sit on that kind of information for eight months? “It was easy for me,” said Cooper, 37, who caters and cooks at private parties throughout the Philadelphia area as Succulent Imagination.

“Sometimes you have to be patient. I just lived my normal life — working, going to my caterings, being at home with my wife, my daughter [Kailani, almost 12], and my dog, working out, testing out new recipes, things like that.”

Fieri’s name hangs locally on Guy Fieri’s Taco Joint and Guy Fieri’s Burger Joint at the Live! Casino in South Philadelphia and over a Guy’s Chophouse at Harrah’s in Atlantic City. He previously had Guy Fieri’s Philly Kitchen & Bar at the Harrah’s in Chester.

Cooper grew up in the city’s Hunting Park neighborhood, the oldest of seven kids. He got “Steek” from childhood. “My mom said I was a stinky baby, but my siblings always said, ‘Stink.’ Kedisha always called me ‘Steek,’ and when the twins were born, it just stuck,” he said.

His kitchen moment occurred at age 9, when his mother gave him a jar of generic peanut butter and he made peanut butter cookies. He ended up making them daily, and his family begged him to switch it up.

“I never really felt like I meshed well with the people around me,” Cooper said. When he was young, his neighbors would be outside playing sports and “getting dirty and things of that nature, and I was never interested in that. I always knew that I wanted to cook. However, being from the ‘hood. I didn’t have the confidence to pursue it, even though my mother gave me the opportunity to explore it at home.”

The Army helped him focus. “I got the confidence and the discipline that I needed to be great and successful in this industry,” he said. His commander allowed him to work at an Outback Steakhouse after hours, he said. From there, he enrolled at the JNA Institute of Culinary Arts in South Philadelphia, where he was valedictorian. He won an episode in 2017 of the Food Network series Cooks vs. Cons, where home cooks competed against pros, and competed on Food Network Canada’s Fire Masters as well as Guy’s Grocery Games.

Guy’s Chance of a Lifetime molded him further. Guy Fieri “was teaching us life lessons, like things that we needed to work on,” Cooper said. “One thing he told me was ‘We all know that you are an amazing guy. You need to smile a lot more.’ I get it. However, one of my goals is to show people that it doesn’t matter where you come from, it’s about where you’re going.”

The shoot was “a pretty grand and great experience,” he said. “It basically molded me and strengthened me to become better. I was stressed in my personal life to a point where I didn’t think I would have made it, but I did really well.”

So did his wife. She recently had her last chemo treatment, he said.