'I WANT IT TO BE REAL'

Padma Lakshmi on food TV and her new cookbook

- JULIA MOSKIN

Being something of an outsider has been part of Padma Lakshmi’s identity for as long as she can remember.

Born in Chennai, India, in 1970, she is the only child of a courageous mother who left an arranged marriage and moved to New York City, supporting them both as an oncology nurse at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

In the 1980s and 90s, Lakshmi stuck out in Roman Catholic school in Queens, in high school in suburban Los Angeles and as one of the first supermodels of South Asian descent.

Long before she hosted Top Chef, she found belonging in the kitchen. During summers in India, she followed her grandmother and aunties around and learned to make dosas and idli. As a (bored) working model, she cooked for colleagues on sets and shoots around the world, and published her first cookbook Easy Exotic at age 27.

She has lived in the United States for 50 of her 55 years, and is a naturalised citizen. But during the first Trump administration, she suddenly felt like an outsider again. In 2017, she began working with the American Civil Liberties Union as an advocate for immigrants’ rights. She resigned from Top Chef in 2023.

Her new book Padma’s All American: Tales, Travels, And Recipes From Taste The Nation And Beyond was published last month.

It began life as a cookbook proposal and became the scaffolding for the Hulu show Taste The Nation, for which she received an Emmy nomination in 2023.