Yes, Chef!

What do you do if your fiancee is driving a beater of a car, but you’re in your final year of law school without the means to help her out? An enthusiastic amateur cook, Zac DeLap conceived the longshot idea of competing on a cooking show.

“We knew we wanted to leave the LA area as soon as I finished law school,” DeLap says. “But I thought I’d try to get on a show first and make some game show money.”

Now a real estate partner at Hillis Clark Martin & Peterson in Seattle, DeLap learned to love cooking from professional chefs: two uncles and his older brother, Jensen. In law school and while studying in New Zealand, he baked and cooked for fellow students, partly as a way to relieve stress.

When he auditioned for the show Food Fighters on NBC via Skype, he presented a dish of Asian seared tuna—except he didn’t have immediate access to tuna, so he substituted sliced beets. Also—“I improvised and made the dish in a hotel bathroom.” The producer picked him and pitted him against five professional chefs in five 20-minute rounds, all shot in one day. The filming took place during a big week in his life, sandwiched between law school final exams and his honeymoon with Kelsey.

DeLap says he felt nervous at first, then shifted into “game mode,” winning two of the first four rounds with his signature dishes, which the professional chefs had to make their own versions of without prior notice of what he’d be making.

“There’s a lot of pressure, because the other chefs are talking trash to you, while the host comes up and interrupts you to talk,” he recalls. “You really only have 20 minutes, though they reshoot the last 10 seconds where you see the chefs sprinkling toppings and doing the final touches.”

In the final round, he faced his toughest opponent, an acclaimed head chef with restaurants around the country. DeLap prepared Vietnamese lemongrass banh mi sandwiches with pork sausage, while the chef countered with kimchi pork sandwiches. The five judges, tasting blind, chose DeLap’s dish. Sitting in the audience, Kelsey screamed in excitement. The losing chef, he says, was not pleased. While giving DeLap a congratulatory hug, the chef whispered a comment in his ear.

“All that I’ll say is that it was some words he didn’t want on TV,” DeLap says with a laugh.
DeLap took home $60,000 for his three winning rounds, more than enough to buy Kelsey a new Kia Soul. It ended up getting stolen in 2023—but by then, he was a practicing attorney and could afford an upgrade to a new Subaru.

Food Fighters wasn’t the end of DeLap’s competitive cooking career. He and Kelsey moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where he started a job as in-house counsel for a title company. He took culinary classes at night while Kelsey worked late hours. His school’s team did well at American Culinary Federation competitions. He also individually qualified for the World Food Championships in 2019 and 2020.

Now, as a busy attorney handling real estate transactions, affordable housing development, title insurance disputes, and condominium and homeowners association issues, he wishes he had time to continue his high-end culinary efforts. He would like to launch some type of retail food product line. Maybe sauces or Asian cookie dough. But these days, he gets creative satisfaction from devising eight-course tasting menus at home for his family and friends, most recently challenging himself to make a vegan feast.

His real labor of love, though, is teaching his 3-year-old daughter, Diana, the older of his two girls, to cook and to diversify her fledgling palate. “She’s in the kitchen with me mixing, on a stepladder,” he says. “I’m teaching her how to make her own scrambled eggs.” 

Chef’s Choice

Zac DeLap’s favorite food destination is Taipei City in Taiwan—specifically, the night markets, where he says you can go to five stalls in an hour and sample great—and cheap—versions of five dishes, like green onion pancakes, cooked fresh on the grill. “It’s more fun than sitting at a restaurant table. At each booth, you taste a dish someone has perfected over years.”

He also has plenty of favorites closer to home in Western Washington:

• Taiwanese pork burger at Facing East in Bellevue
• Coconut bun at Cake House in Seattle’s International District
• Purple rice rolls at Tofu 101 in Factoria
• Salted egg yolk custard bun at Homestyle Dim Sum in Seattle’s International District
• Hamburgers at Joe’s Burgers in Kirkland