The Voice Coach has been busy “perfecting” her “go-to” surprise dinner.
Kelsea Ballerini is a multi-hyphenate superstar. Beyond being a Coach on The Voice Season 27, she’s a Grammy-nominated country songstress and a whiz in the kitchen. C’mon, did you see her Thanksgiving turkey?
When Ballerini has some downtime these days, she told Byrdie in a recent interview that she likes to cook. Specifically, a nice steak as a surprise for her boyfriend, Outer Banks star Chase Stokes. “That’s the go-to now and my favorite thing ever,” she said. “I’ll go to the butcher, I’ll get a good cut of steak, I’ll come home and marinate it in the fridge — I won’t even tell him.”
And when the “What should we have for dinner?” conversation comes up, Ballerini is ready to go. “Then it’s dinner time, and I just pull out this marinated steak,” she told Byrdie. “And I’m like, ‘Yes I am that b—-.’”
Chase Stokes and Kelsea Ballerini attend the The 67th Annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, California on February 2, 2025. Photo: Francis Specker/CBS/Getty Images
Spending quality time together doing simple things, like enjoying a delicious home-cooked steak, is something Ballerini treasures with Stokes. “Things that seem mundane suddenly become like, ‘OK, you’re such an important part of my mundanity now,’” she told the publication. “And it doesn’t take away from the moments that are big, like getting to show up to a premiere for him or him being at Madison Square Garden.”
Kelsea Ballerini and Chase Stokes celebrated their anniversary in January 2025
Ballerini and Stokes became an item in early 2023 after the “Cowboys Cry Too” singer slid into the actor’s DMs, as she told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show. Now, two years later, the couple celebrated their second anniversary on January 7, 2025. And Ballerini even touched on her current obsession with “perfecting” steak in her heartfelt anniversary post on Instagram.
“Two years of catching each other in countless cities, perfecting a chimichurri steak, and creating a world that revolves around dogs,” she captioned a collection of photos of the couple. “Love you so, teammate.”
Stokes also commemorated their anniversary with an equally sweet Instagram post. “2 laps around the sun with you, i love you kb 🤍(especially when you laugh so hard you wheeze, and 8 am dance routines to your toothbrush),” he captioned several candid photos of the happy couple.
Chase Stokes and Kelsea Ballerini poses for the 2024 CMT Music Awards portraits at the Moody Center on April 7, 2024 in Austin, Texas. Photo: John Shearer/Getty Images for CMT
After two years together, Ballerini told Byrdie that she and Stokes have been focused on nurturing their life together. “From the jump, we’ve always been really proud of our relationship,” she said, before adding, “We’re really building our life together. The more into that season we get, the more protective we are.”
Ballerini is indeed protective of her relationship with Stokes. She told TODAY’s Willie Geist in October 2024 that she’s “not used to the interest in me as a person” outside of her professional career as an artist. “And so, I’m still getting my footing on how to share things and what I share and my relationship and all that stuff,” she told Geist.
While they’re understandably protective of their relationship, the love they share is glaringly obvious. After all, as Stokes told Hoda Kotb in an October 2024 TODAY interview, “I just adore the girl, I really do.”
“I truthfully think, you know, when you find somebody who’s not just somebody you love and adore but is also your best friend, you’ve kind of got the best of both worlds,” Stokes said. “She’s not just a great person, but everything that you see — whether it be on social media or when she’s on stage — is exactly the person she is when she’s not doing those things.”
