Padma Lakshmi — Industry Magazine

Industry Magazine – February/March, 2007

Anyone who has worked as a chef or within shouting distance of one can bear witness to the searing temperatures, stress, perpetual drama and earthquake-like personality meltdowns attendant to life behind “the line.” Simply put, a career spent cooking for others is an exercise in creativity, endurance and terror, and there is perhaps no other work scenario — with the possible exception of a bomb squad — that is as fertile a field from which to grow a reality show. Bravo’s Top Chef, and its host Padma Lakshmi, have quickly found themselves at the top of the cable ratings heap, in part by allowing the show’s competing chefs to wildly indulge their inner-dysfunctional children. The results are delicious.

Lakshmi, 36, was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India and appears to tote every last scrap of that Brahmin exoticism (her name translates to “lotus goddess” in Sanskrit) on her 5’10” frame. Discovered by a representative of a Spanish modeling agency while still in college, she spent years being shot by fashion houses such as Emmanuel Ungaro, Ralph Lauren, Roberto Cavalli and Versus. Her passion however, always found its purest expression in the kitchen.

Easy Exotic: Low-Fat Recipes from Around the World (Miramax Books, 2000), her first cookbook, answered the burning question as to whether models actually consume anything. Equal parts travelogue, memoir and cookbook, Easy Exotic introduced to the culinary world Lakshmi’s taste for adventure as well as her habit for trend bashing. In those pages, she pureed the notion of Indian food as heavy, diced the misconception of healthy food as bland and uninspired and Cuisinarted any doubt as to whether models can also be brainiacs (she is fluent in English, Italian, Spanish, Hindi and Tamil).

Recruited as host of the Food Network series Melting Pot, Lakshmi cultivated her on-screen persona and was a natural when Bravo decided to replace host Gail Simmons for its second season of Top Chef. The show pits chefs against each other in weekly challenges. Judged by a rotating cast of professional chefs and other pundits from the food and wine industry, the winner receives $100,000 and a gig at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Colo.

Fame followed Lakshmi to the alter when she married author Salman Rushdie in 2004. Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses so enraged Muslim society that the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran issued a death warrant for him. They live in New York, and Padma sat down with Industry from her home there.

Matt Scanlon for INDUSTRY: It’s hard to tell, watching Top Chef, how much involvement you really get to have in the proceedings. Are you in the trenches, or is your perch a little higher?

PL: [Laughs] Actually, for every two minutes that you see, especially at the judge’s table, there’s an hour on the cutting room floor. It’s humbling because, you think “Hands on, we were there for five hours at two o’clock in the morning hashing this out and you don’t see any of it.” Tom and Gail [regular judges Tom Coliccio and Gail Simmons] and I and the guest judges — whether it’s Ming Tsai or Anthony Bourdain — have equal weight, we all get one vote. Sometimes we bicker back and forth. And, you know, at times my tastes may be different than the judges’. But I’m happy to report there was never a moment when, at least I, went home to bed thinking “Damn, I don’t know if that was the right thing.”

INDUSTRY: Are you literally an eye in the sky to the sort of craziness and infighting between the contestants? How much of that do you see?

Top Chef Cast PL: I see it after the fact. I had no idea that there was such animosity between [contestants] Marcel and Betty, between Maurice and the others, between Cliff and Mia. I only get to take that in when it appears at the judges table.

INDUSTRY: … Though you must have rubbed your hands together when you saw some of the fighting and thought, “This is great stuff!”

PL: Not really, because I’m there for the food. Though, there were times, when I thought — never mind anyone’s sense of decorum or ethics — “God, you’re on national TV. What are you thinking?”

INDUSTRY: A lot of the commentary I read about the show alternately praises and chastises it because it tends to depict the communication among the contestants as much as the food. And okay, that’s fine … but I worked in a restaurant for a time, and chefs really are crazy.

PL: Yeah, they’re f***ing mad. Some of my fondest and most frightening moments of my working life have resulted from the pressure of being in the weeds at work, combined with a 350° oven … it makes for very interesting moments. And then there’s the little added thing of sticking 15 people in small dorm rooms. Stuff’s bound to happen. They’re away from their home, they’re away from their families. Of course, I don’t know anybody who doesn’t get crazy about what they’re passionate about. Whether it’s food, or film, fashion or brain surgery — and someone being great at their job, or striving to be as great at their job as they know how — is very compelling to watch.

INDUSTRY: Have you every tasted anything on the show and thought “this is just awful”?

PL: Yes. Mia’s drink was utterly disgusting. You just don’t mix creamy liquor with citrus. It [Orange Juice, Crown Royal and mint Bailey’s] curdled in the glass and tasted, well … poor Mia. She herself in that episode said, “I don’t drink mixed drinks, I’m not a bartender.” And sure enough, it was clear when you tasted her drink.

INDUSTRY: It seems that we can’t swing a stick without hitting comparisons between Top Chef and shows like Project Runway and Hell's Kitchen. How do you compare them?

PL: I don’t, really. I’m not a big fan of reality television, and I think of our show more as a competition show. I’ve actually never seen Hell’s Kitchen, I think Project Runway is a great show though, and I don’t ever mind being compared to it. What the two have in common is a collection of judges who actually know what they’re doing. Judges have to know the difference between a julienne and a chiffanod, you have to know what it means to have a uniform heating source, you have to know what you can add meringue to. Just as in fashion, you have to know what a gusseted seam versus a rolled hem, a stovepipe pant leg an opposed to a boot cut. All of those things have to do with both science and art.

Padma Lakshmi at a fish market INDUSTRY: I know that your passion for food stems in part from your upbringing …

PL: [Laughs.] That’s an understatement. I have a very big family. If you throw a stone hard enough, you’ll hit a relative of mine. They’re all over the world … Japan, Fiji, everywhere. And the joke is, there are certain members in my family who will finish the last fork full of breakfast and say, “So what are we gonna make for lunch?” And that pretty much tells you how I grew up.

INDUSTRY: Do you recall the first dish you made?

PL: Absolutely.

INDUSTRY: I’m conjuring an image of saffron, cumin and coconut milk.

PL: Ummm … French fries. But they were damn good. I grew up in a Brahmin household and cooking seemed to me to be very feminine, very glamorous … sensual and there was obviously something very early on that was imprinted into my head that equated cooking with femininity and love and celebration.

INDUSTRY: And you have a new book coming out in the spring?

PL: I do. Because of the shooting schedule, it might be pushed back to the fall, but it’ll be out by Labor Day in any case. It’s called Tangy, Tart, Hot and Sweet, because that’s what all of the flavors I love encompass.

INDUSTRY: This year marks the 18th anniversary of the death warrant against your husband. How does something like that affect you … and him?

PL: You know, it doesn’t. We are happy and busy and careful — of course — but it’s a situation that simply does not affect us on a day-to-day basis.

Easy Exotic Book Cover INDUSTRY: Your first cookbook, Easy Exotic, had a certain … irony attached to it, coming from someone who has pursued a career in modeling who’s also in love with food. Given your talent in the kitchen, was it difficult choosing a career in an industry that embraces pathological thinness to the extent that modeling does?

PL: It might have been tougher if I’d had this insatiable drive to model from the beginning. I did have a successful modeling career and it’s been a very happy and lucky one, though actually unexpected. I went to college thinking I would probably teach drama, and modeling was always something I fell into after college. In a way, so was cooking. I don’t mean to suggest that I didn’t work hard or that I wasn’t ambitious and things just miraculously fell into my lap, but I have always tried to push against the open door … tried to find a way to do what I already loved. Modeling allowed me to pay off my college loans, it allowed me to pursue my acting career and not be a waitress. In the same way that modeling allowed me to travel the world, it also allowed me to taste the world and it is out of modeling - out of my travels — that my culinary education came.

INDUSTRY: How does the new book differ from Easy Exotic?

PL: Well, that first cookbook was a lark. I was very lucky to get it and I think people were just — you called it an irony — people were curious to what a model ate. I mean, every time I was at a dinner table, when people would see me eat normally, some would scratch their heads and wonder. The book was an answer to the love-of-food-and-staying-thin paradox. The new book emphasizes health consciousness less and indulgence a bit more.

INDUSTRY: One myth that Easy Exotic dispelled for me is the impression of Indian food as being heavy and buttery.

PL: Well, you likely haven’t been exposed to the dishes in the book because they’re actually Indian home cooking. Most Indian restaurants in the West specialize in northwestern Indian — or Punjab — food. Partly because of the climate there [Punjab straddles the boarder between India and Pakistan], Punjabi food is heavier. It has cream and butter and a lot of sauces with meat. And because it is such a poor country, the people’s use of a lot of fat in their cooking is a way of being hospitable to guests, lavishing upon them the way that a French chef might lavish fois gras as a delicacy. Mind you, I love Punjabi food and I do make Punjabi dishes, but I can’t eat that way every day. For instance, I love samosas, but instead of potato samosas, I make a minced curry chicken variation. That’s something that the Indians brought over to Bali, incidentally. I don’t use a lot of cream. I use coconut milk, or non-fat yogurt. That said, Tangy, Tart, Hot and Sweet is not low-fat [laughs]. You’ll see a lot of things like Moroccan Bastilla, a phyllo pastry drenched in butter, chocolate amaretto ice cream and honeycomb and fig ice cream. Then there’s chili honey butter, which is exactly that. I just can’t keep it in the fridge anymore because every time I laid eyes on it, I wanted to spread it on something, whether it was toast or …

INDUSTRY: Yeah, it would be more like a dip for me.

Padma Lakshmi PL: [laughs] Oh yeah … so there’s’ lots of thing like that. Crab cakes with green, hot Serrano chilies and cilantro and dried green mango powder. There are taquitoes with wild mushroom and goat cheese that you dip in a mint dipping sauce. There’s also Mexican stuffed ancho chilies — sun-dried chilies with ground beef stuffed into them. So there’s really something for every palate. One of my favorites is a classic beef brisket done with Barolo; a recipe called Brissato a Barolo, which is wrapped in pancetta or bacon and slow cooked for six hours, after soaking it in Barolo for about two days. And there’s this incredible Kashmiri dish called koste, which is very classically Indian and it’s basically minced lamb meatballs that are simmering in a spinach and cream sauce.

INDUSTRY: What’s you desert island food? If you could have only have one thing forever?

PL: It’d have to be Thai … something like green curry chicken.

INDUSTRY: And wine. What are your favorites these days?

PL: I like Italian wines a lot. I like French wines, but I’m not as knowledgeable about them as I should be. Tignanello is a real favorite. It’s a very heavy full-bodied, rich wine. It’s like a Dolcetto. I also like Brunellos, those kinds of deep, beautiful wines.

INDUSTRY: It’s actually great to hear recipes involving a bit of richness again. If I read one more soy and pea pod homage …

PL: In measured doses, indulgence is fine. No … it’s mandatory. So much about eating is steeped in control and guilt and regret. To hell with that. Sometimes you just need to eat the riches food in the world.