Philly chef Kevin Cooper opens Chicken Guy in King of Prussia with Guy Fieri

Thursday morning, Kevin Cooper will cut the ribbon for the new Chicken Guy stand at King of Prussia’s food court. In truth, it’s not just “the new Chicken Guy stand.”

It’s his Chicken Guy stand.

Cooper is a partner with founders Guy Fieri and Robert Earl on this location, the grand prize for winning the Food Network show Guy’s Chance of a Lifetime.

Chicken Guy — which sells chicken sandwiches, bowls, fries, and shakes — launched in 2018 during the height of the fast-food fried-chicken craze. Fieri, the spike-haired TV host and pitchman, joined Earl, founder of Planet Hollywood, on the flagship location at Disney Springs in Walt Disney World. There’s one in Atlantic City among 11 now open; eight more, including King of Prussia, are on the way.

“This is way more than a restaurant opening,” Fieri said by Zoom last week. “This is about the life and times of Kevin Cooper. This guy is a veteran, this guy is a family man, a chef, entrepreneur, and he put himself out on a limb. He has grown tremendously. He’s trained really hard. It’s like a Rocky movie.” Gonna fry now.

Cooper, 39, grew up in the Hunting Park section of North Philadelphia, the oldest of seven kids. He was “Steek” around house. “My mom said I was a stinky baby, but my siblings always said, ‘Stink,’” Cooper said. His sister Kedisha changed that to “Steek,” and it stuck, he said.

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

Quiet by nature, Cooper said, he stayed out of trouble. “I’ve always been a unique kind of a guy. I wasn’t the guy who was running around playing sports. I wasn’t the guy who was running around getting dirty. As a black man in the ‘hood — there were no artsy black men in the hood. I was into food. I wanted to bake.”

He served seven years in the Army, leaving as a staff sergeant, followed by six years in the National Guard. Lean and muscular, he maintains a strong military bearing.

“Once I joined the military, I found it’s OK for me to be myself,” he said. “The military gave me that confidence and that discipline to finally do what I wanted to do professionally.”

He went to culinary school, got restaurant jobs, and started a catering company, Succulent Imagination. Then he heard about Guy’s Chance of a Lifetime and thought he’d give it a shot.

The six-episode show was taped in mid-2021. Cooper had drama of his own playing out when he went to Orlando for the competition against six other chefs. His wife, LaToya, had recently started treatment for breast cancer. During the taping, he learned that his sister Kedisha had died. (LaToya has recovered, and wrote a book, Surrender to Healing, about her own journey. The couple, who live in Drexel Hill, have a 14-year-old daughter, Kailani.)

The Guy’s Chance of a Lifetime finale aired in February 2022 — a full two years ago. Why the delay? “They’re just not giving out franchises to anyone,” Cooper said, explaining that the lease had to be negotiated and legal dealings had to happen. “I had to go through extensive training to ensure that we will all be successful here. It’s just one of those things where great things happen to those who wait.”

“We’ve got a lot at stake here for Chicken Guy, and for Kevin,” Fieri said.

The King of Prussia location will become Cooper’s franchise after a year, Fieri said. “The deal in the show is that we built the restaurant for him, and paid him to go through training and did everything to give him the restaurant. Once he gets it up and it’s running, it’s his restaurant as if he had built it. That was the whole concept of the show, because [it’s] a million bucks to build the restaurant. This is a turnkey operation.”

Cooper — “Coop,” as Fieri calls him — has picked up Fieri’s passion along the way. Asked for the difference between Chicken Guy’s food and his competitors’, he said: “Our food is real food and I’m not here to talk about anybody else. We know everything that’s inside of our recipes. We just do the freshest. We have the Rolls-Royce of chicken.”

The tenders are brined with lemon, buttermilk, pickle juice, and garlic and are hand-dredged in the coating before they’re pressure-fried to keep it from being too oily. “We not only season our own breading, but we also season [the tenders] after they come out of the oil,” he said, his voice rising as he recounts the process. “Our spicy seasoning is not embedded in the chicken. It’s seasoned after the chicken comes out.” Sauces are made-in-house.

Fieri, who has had other restaurant concepts over the years, said, “I love fried chicken. I mean, even bad fried chicken is good. It’s kind of like pizza: When it’s good, it’s really good and when it’s bad, most people will still eat it.”

Cooper has about 20 people on his opening team, led by corporate trainers. “My goal is to essentially continue to grow and build more Chicken Guys, and not just provide jobs, but to teach [the workers] about professional growth and teach them about personal growth. We all know a lot of people who work for these fast-casual establishments are trying to figure it out.”