Photography by Walling McGarity
Padma Lakshmi is a woman who loves food: reading about it, writing about it, cooking it with her daughter, 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, and Lakshmi has only been back in the city for a few weeks after wrapping 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, but they were so creative and so wonderful.”
Since bursting 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 to a few high-profile relationships, to her hosting and judging 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. 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’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 photos of her simply 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 whom she was in a relationship until he succumbed to brain cancer in 2011.
One of the most interesting observations about Lakshmi is how easily she subverts most assumptions made about her. She’s a late-night quesadilla addict who also loves fried chicken, and once said that a hostess could serve her a container of movie theater nachos and she’d go home happy. (Attention, Bravo execs: “Padma Works the Concession Stand” sounds like a winner.) When Top Chef nabbed its latest Emmy nomination in July, she celebrated not with a party, but by eating Popsicles with her daughter.
The show has also acted as a golden ticket for Lakshmi to infiltrate the typically clubby bunch of chefs who usually bond over long hours, family meals and exhaustion. Before we spoke, she was texting a friend she met last year: Noma chef RenéRedzepi, considered by many to be the best in the world. Lakshmi was also one of the few non-Michelin-starred guests at the surprise party for chef Wylie Dufresne last April.
None of these things seem very surprising to Lakshmi, who loves being entrenched in the food world and considers herself a food journalist above all. “I naturally delight in being very descriptive about what I’m tasting, smelling and feeling,” she says. Like many aspiring food writers, Lakshmi worshiped at the proverbial apron hem of the legendary food author M.F.K. Fisher. “I think she, more than anyone, really shaped my philosophy and worldview about food and certainly seduced me into a career in food writing,” says Lakshmi, who’s also a fan of books Alice, Let’s Eat and Third Helpings by journalist Calvin Trillin. “Everyone’s a food writer now,” she says. “I really like New York Magazine and[particularly] Adam Platt’s writing. I think it’s funny and irreverent.”
A matter that Top Chef doesn’t often discuss is the state of the food industry today—an ever-expanding topic that’s not easy to digest between commercial breaks. With the obesity rate at an all-time high, Lakshmi is particularly concerned with how people eat at home. “I think there’s an epidemic because we eat a lot of processed food with a lot of salt and fillers,” she says. “We like our prices low, our portions big and our food very fatty. That is going to make for a very dangerous diet on a consistent basis, and we don’t exercise enough.”
Lakshmi believes a person’s eating patterns are created during their first four of five years of life. “Once you miss that window, it’s gone,” she says. “Their brain development, skeletal system and so much about their biology is happening at such a rapid rate that it’s very important to develop a palate and set a standard for what they should and shouldn’t eat, and what they’re willing to eat.”
Luckily, Krishna seems to possess her mother’s taste. “I never gave her a single bottle of baby food,” she says. “[Healthy food is] easy to make and actually much cheaper. You just put [the food] into a blender!”
Living in a city that revolves around food, Lakshmi fits right in, to an extent. She won’t shill green juices, bend over backward in workout videos or drone on about elimination diets. As for all the fuss about her enviable figure, Lakshmi simply works at it by boxing, skipping rope, running stairs and lifting weights, which help her shed the two dress sizes she gains during each season. Overall she strikes a healthy balance: careful but not restrictive, dedicated yet practical.
That level of dedication extends to her other passion project, the Endometriosis Foundation of America, which Lakshmi co-founded five years ago with her surgeon Dr. Tamer Seckin, to grow awareness and combat the disease that affects 176 million women around the world. Those suffering from endometriosis have severe pain and complications when tissue that normally grows inside the uterus grows outside as well. After suffering with the illness for 20 years—she says in high school the pain was so bad her mother let her write her own ‘get-out-of-school’ notes—she was finally properly diagnosed and underwent several surgeries.
One of the foundation’s goals is to educate teenagers about the disease, and they’ve just received a $250,000 grant from the state of New York to further their cause. “I think endometriosis is what breast cancer was in the ’70s,” she says. “It’s a family issue. When a woman is suffering, it’s not just her, it’s her children, her spouse, her coworkers, her friends.”
Celebrities, including Susan Sarandon and Whoopi Goldberg, have lent their support, and Lakshmi says she’d love to recruit a younger generation of prominent women to speak out. “I think the more people understand it, the more it will be demystified. It will be just another [illness] that we treat,” she says. “We have no problem talking about prostate cancer, and that’s [considered] equally ‘icky.’”
As for other projects, Lakshmi is working on a few new books and debuting a home decor line, The Padma Collection, this fall, which features serving platters, dishes and everything needed to become the consummate hostess. It’s hard not to imagine her spinning all of this into something even bigger down the line, but meanwhile, what Lakshmi really wants to do is keep grazing, tasting life a little bit at a time. “If you can find a way to make a living doing what you naturally love to do, then your life is pretty great,” she says—and that’s an idea that doesn’t come with an expiration date.
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