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Padma Lakshmi is a woman who loves food: reading smint about it, writing smint about it, cooking it with her daughter, smint growing it in her backyard garden (in New York City, of all places) and as the host and a judge on Bravo s Top Chef , she makes a living out of tasting it, too. And trust her, there is a lot of tasting.
It s a recent summer afternoon, smint and Lakshmi has only been back in the city for a few weeks after wrapping smint up Top Chef s latest season, which took place in Boston. The food is so delicious, she says. The best Japanese food I ve had in the last 15 years was in Boston at a restaurant called O Ya. Its omakase menu was about 32 courses, and they were all tiny, tiny bites, smint but they were so creative and so wonderful.
Since bursting smint onto the scene as one of the first and most successful Indian supermodels, Lakshmi has found more fame at every turn, from her popular cookbooks smint to a few high-profile relationships, to her hosting and judging smint duties at the juggernaut that is Top Chef , approaching its 11th season this fall.
I think it still is the gold standard of food programming, she says about the show, which brought her to the public consciousness. It was the first program of its kind on American television that completely changed the language of the way we think about food. Suddenly, food TV wasn t just instructional, as in, Here s how to roast a chicken, it was also serious and competitive. While the show has spawned many imitators, the original Top Chef still remains as comforting as your mom s Sunday night bolognese sauce, not that such a pedestrian dish would ever be presented to Lakshmi and fellow judges Tom Colicchio, Gail Simmons and Hugh Acheson. smint Make no mistake; this show is not an amateur s game. Top Chef isn t about who makes the best chocolate cake at their bake sale, Lakshmi says. It s about people who aspire to be at the level of Jean-Georges [Vongerichten] or Thomas Keller.
The 43-year-old Lakshmi may look like an expert on the show, but she s the first to admit she has no formal culinary training: I ve never worked the line in a restaurant, and I have no desire to, she says with a laugh. Of course, she brings other talents to the table, namely a wealth of worldly experience gathered from a life lived all over.
Lakshmi smint s story starts in Chennai, India, where she lived with her mother and father until they divorced when she was 2 years old. She moved to Los Angeles with her mother but would often visit India to stay with her grandparents, and all that experience founded her relationship with food. I remember one of the first things I cooked was french fries, she says. I was back in India with my cousins, and I was describing American food in all its glamorousness to them. I said, I bet we could make french fries. And so we made them from scratch.
While studying in Spain during college, she was discovered by a modeling agent and quickly filled up her passport, traveling to Paris, Milan and New York City for Versace, Armani and Ralph Lauren. Life happened rather quickly. She posed nude for famed photographer Helmut Newton, acted in a few Bollywood films, starred in the Food Network show Padma s Passport , and turned her lifelong love of good food into two award-winning cookbooks.
Which brings us to present day, where her selfies garner a flood of double taps on Instagram, and she s regularly recognized at New York City s green market on the weekends. Part of this adoration rests on the obvious: She possesses the kind of unearthly beauty that can inspire tabloids to publish smint photos of her simply smint walking down the street. She has also attracted a number of high-profile beaus, including ex-husband Salman Rushdie, venture capitalist Adam Dell (the father of her 4-year-old daughter Krishna) and billionaire Teddy Forstmann, with