August 22, 2025
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Former Eagles chef Tim Lopez shares two recipes for every NFL team in 'Kickoff Kitchen,' out Tuesday.
Tim Lopez can still tell you the soup and sandwich he made to land his job cooking for the Eagles almost two decades ago. Working with leftovers in the team's kitchen, he whipped up a spicy avocado spread for the bread, grilled some chicken breast and piled on heirloom tomatoes and bacon. Then, for the soup, he took bits of smoked salmon and turned them into a chowder.
That chowder is one of the 64 recipes in Lopez's new cookbook "Kickoff Kitchen," which includes two dishes for every team in the NFL. The collection, out Tuesday, builds on an initiative he started during his 13 years with the Birds to get inside the minds of rivals through their food — or, as he called it, "devour the competition."
Lopez estimates he served a little less than half the book's recipes to the players. The rest came from additional research and development after he left the team in 2020. Philadelphia's dishes are, naturally, a roast pork sandwich and cheesesteak eggrolls. But readers will also find step-by-step instructions for preparing Nashville hot chicken (for the Titans), fish tacos (for the Chargers) and Cuban sandwiches (for the Dolphins), among dozens of other game day eats.
The varied spread reflects the many different foods Lopez dished up for the Eagles during his tenure, which included their Super Bowl victory in 2018. As he recalled, players ate based on nutrition plans designed for them and the demands of the week. The carb-loading day, he said, was typically Thursday or Friday. But players might gravitate toward the grill for lean meats or the smoothie station for a Muscle Milk-packed shake on other afternoons.
"The players, it's like a supercar," he said. "If you put bad gas in the supercar, it's not gonna take you far. It's not going to perform at its best. So if you put the best fuel in, you're going to get the absolute best result and you're gonna win the race."
The kitchen staff also tried to stock the cafeteria with foods familiar to each player. When Jordan Mailata joined the team, Lopez remembers ordering Australian condiments like Vegemite, Marmite and chicken salt. After he had a conversation with Carson Wentz about creamed eggs, a dish the former Eagle's dad made for him when he was bulking up for high school football, Lopez whipped up multiple versions for the quarterback to taste.
"And he goes, that middle one, that's what my dad used to make," Lopez remembered. "He was like, how did you do that? Why did you do that? And I said, 'cause it mattered to me. It's a part of your food culture and I wanted to give you that moment of tasting something that you had when you were growing up. Like that 'Ratatouille' moment, you know, from that Disney movie? We're all kind of searching for that with the foods that we consume, I think, and I just was lucky enough to be able to try and provide that for a lot of Eagles players."
Lopez now works at the Jules E. Mastbaum High School as a culinary arts teacher. His course has been the most popular career and technical education option for three years in a row, a success Lopez chalks up to "the fact that you get to eat in class." (A teacher with a Super Bowl ring is also undoubtedly a draw.) Just as he did with Wentz, he strives to get to know his students' food culture, and expose them to new ones outside Birds territory — or just their own homes.
"Philly's got such a wide range of food culture, and I find that a lot of our students know nothing about it, 'cause a lot of them, they live in their neighborhood, they come to the school and they go back to their neighborhood," Lopez said. "So we try to teach them a lot about different foods in Philadelphia and around the world and stuff they haven't had before. Get them out of their comfort zone."
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