Padma Lakshmi Talks ‘Top Chef’, ‘Taste The Nation’ And That Elusive Emmy Win: “I am the Susan Lucci Of Reality Television”
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Culinary super tastemaker Padma Lakshmi is once again in the running for Emmys, both for Bravo’s Top Chef and her Hulu series Taste the Nation. Over her years of hosting and executive producing Top Chef, she has earned 14 Emmy nominations herself, but victory has remained, tantalizingly, just beyond her reach.
“We’re in the golden age of television, and it’s really competitive. I’m sort of the Susan Lucci of reality television,” she tells Deadline. “It would be lovely to win, especially because this is our 20th season of Top Chef.”
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Lakshmi made her debut as host in season 2 of the two-time Emmy-winning reality competition show, and has been a main ingredient in Top Chef’s success for 17 years now.
“We’re doing the show for the fans, and I’m really lucky we have such loyal, interested fans,” she says. “Twenty seasons is a long time. I hope we do win, I’m not going to lie, but I don’t know what our chances are.”
Over the years, Lakshmi has witnessed significant changes at Top Chef.
“The caliber of the contestants has just gotten better and better and we’ve gotten more diverse in our casting,” she notes. “We still have a-ways to go, but we’re doing great compared to our earlier seasons.”
Along with gustatory triumphs, Lakshmi has witnessed some near-disasters in the Top Chef kitchen. One particular incident stands out for her.
“I remember we were in Rochester, New York doing a Thanksgiving special with the Foo Fighters. They were playing to this huge stadium of 12,000 people. And our grills went out. Something happened with the gas lines or the electricity,” she recalls. “It was a nightmare because we had all these chefs who needed to cook. But we worked it into the challenge because they all had the same problem. Dale Talde [chef and cookbook author] figured out how to jerry-rig a grill outside and made it happen. That’s what Top Chef brings out in you – the worst and the best.”
Taste the Nation, her unscripted Hulu series, returns on Friday for season 2. The show, on which she is both host and EP, debuted in 2020. She took on Taste the Nation seasoned (if you’ll pardon the culinary metaphor) by her previous TV experience. “I’ve grown a lot, and I wouldn’t have Taste the Nation if I didn’t have so many seasons of Top Chef under my belt.”
A Critics Choice Award-winning series, Taste The Nation has Lakshmi taking audiences on a journey across America, “exploring the rich and diverse food culture of various immigrant groups,” as the show puts it, “and seeking out the people who have heavily shaped what American food is today.”
“I wanted to use the platform that I had earned from Top Chef and give it to people [immigrants] so that they could speak on their own behalf and could tell their story as they saw fit,” emphasizes Lakshmi, who won a 2022 James Beard Foundation Award for her work on Taste the Nation.
Despite having the might of Top Chef behind her, Lakshmi’s journey to ultimately finding a home for Taste the Nation with Hulu faced many impediments.
“It was very hard to get Taste the Nation greenlit. I am the host of a show [Top Chef] in 174 territories, yet I had a really hard time getting Taste the Nation made,” she says. “Six or seven networks turned it down before Hulu said yes. In retrospect, I’m so glad that [other networks] turned it down. Hulu is so supportive of me as a filmmaker and as an auteur. And when you are working on a show that’s an idea you thought of in your head – and it comes out almost exactly how you envisioned it – that’s a miracle in television.”
That idea in Lakshmi’s head churned and took shape during the 2016 elections, inspiring her to create Taste the Nation. “After the 2016 election, I saw how rudely people out of Washington and on the campaign trail were speaking about immigrants, spewing this vitriol, which was completely untrue,” she says. “I’m an immigrant from India and grew up in an immigrant neighborhood in La Puente, California, which was very Filipino, very Mexican, and very Korean. And so I had a good insight into what different immigrants went through and how they lived their lives.”
The show doesn’t shy away from addressing social issues in a vocal manner. “I had just started working with the ACLU [in 2016] and wanted to find an artistic and creative way to take my advocacy into my professional life so that I could combine the two. I was developing another show on immigration and was writing a book on immigrant food. I showed my producing partner all the research I had done for this book proposal. He said we should combine these two. And that’s how Taste the Nation was born.”
Lakshmi’s relationship with food began as a young girl, and she recalls it all started in the kitchen. “When I was a toddler, I loved to taste different things and was always hanging out in the kitchen – with the women in my family – because that’s where all the action was,” she says. “I would climb up the pantry shelves like a monkey to get the pickle jars – the really spicy chilies. So I think I naturally always had a physical, visceral connection to food and flavors.”
Lakshmi shares some of season 2’s voyages to eclectic cuisines and exploration of lesser-known immigrant stories. “In this season of Taste the Nation, [we did] an episode on Nigerian Americans, and we really tackle Blackness in America,” she says. “As somebody who’s not Black, it was something that I wanted to do very carefully. My producer Nosa Garrick [who’s Nigerian American], did such a great job. I’m very proud, and it’s so close to my heart.”
Additional episodes focus on Filipino and Cambodian immigrants in America. “We do an episode on Filipinos from Daly City, [Calif.]. They talk about the colonial mentality and internalizing the notion that you don’t deserve the same and should be thankful. In Lowell, Massachusetts, a Cambodian community has totally revitalized that town – a drug-infested factory town that went bust. [The] Cambodians came there as refugees – illiterate, without knowing the language. And without having any technical skill, they revitalized this very New England, tawny town.”
For Lakshmi, it is a personal journey of studying and understanding the diverse immigrant population and their cultures on the show.
“On Taste the Nation, it’s a much more cerebral enterprise and a lot of research,” she observes. “I’m telling other people’s stories and letting them tell as much as I can of it. But I’m still shaping it for them and with them. And I take that super seriously.”
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