When Padma Lakshmi packed up her knives and left “Top Chef” after nearly two decades in 2023, she didn’t plan on returning for a second helping of competitive television — but CBS put that back on the menu. However, according to the host, creator and executive producer, “America’s Culinary Cup” isn’t actually reality TV.
“I don’t watch a lot of reality programming, even though I spent my career doing it. Here’s the big difference… it is not a reality show. It’s not, it’s a game show. There’s not much ‘reality’ in it at all if you look at it. There are a lot of differences that the viewer might not even notice, but that are very meaningful to the competitors and the crew,” Lakshmi told TheWrap. “For instance, we do not sequester our contestants. We treat them like normal people. They’re not stuck in a house together. They’re allowed to live normal lives. If they want to go out to dinner, that’s great. If they want to have their family come and visit or stay with them, that’s cool, too. If you want to stay up all night and memorize the rules of gastronomy after you leave that day’s competition, that is your business.”
“I felt very strongly that they shouldn’t live like college students on top of each other. When other people are cooking, they’re in the arena, too. They want to see the gameplay. I tried to make it as close to an elite, high-caliber sporting event as possible,” she continued. “So, of course, we’re interviewing them about what they were thinking, feeling, their decisions — but any NBA game or tennis match in Wimbledon, you will see the players interviewed. So that’s why I don’t call it a reality show. It is departing away from that.”
Lakshmi also serves as judge alongside celebrity chefs Michael Cimarusti and Wylie Dufresne, opposite 16 world-renowned contestants who are fighting to master the show’s 10 Culinary Commandments.
“Here’s another way it’s not a reality show: We don’t have a format,” she noted. “Every episode is different, and I needed something to anchor the show. The Culinary Commandments, for me, served multiple purposes. They allowed me to have organic episodes that were designed around important principles of cooking — rather than a mystery box of ingredients or you have to get to the next level, or whatever it is. But it also provided us with a unifying umbrella that did not make it feel repetitive. I wanted to keep not only the chefs guessing, but the audience guessing.”
“I knew it would be compared to my other work, and I didn’t want that to be what based every decision for me. If I was going to come back to the genre, I did want to make a different one, so in my head I was already doing the mental exercise of ‘What didn’t I like, what did I like and how to make it different.’ I really thought that the genre needed a refresh,” Lakshmi added. “That always bothered me, in all of these shows in any genre, that you would have them sequestered and they would be under mental duress — even their phone calls had to be monitored. You can read all the books you want, you can go to all the restaurants you want, but it’s your hands, it’s your palette that has to do the work in that arena every day.”
Lakshmi further critiqued her fellow entries in the world of televised cooking competitions for not setting their contestants up for success.
“The main ethos that guides every decision on our show is, ‘How can we support these amazing chefs to do the best work.’ It is not, ‘How do we put obstacles in front of them? How do we sabotage them?’” she explained. “It’s like if you had a great artist, you wouldn’t give them terrible brushes and yucky paints, or if you had a musician, you’re not going to give them an out-of-tune guitar or violin.”
One of the first season’s Culinary Commandments is Sustainability, which was something the production was proud to employ behind the scenes as well.
“From an economic point of view, you can’t run a restaurant with a lot of waste. But there’s also a moral imperative about respecting the environment. When so many people do have some scarcity, I just feel, on principle, on ethics, we should do as much as we can,” Lakshmi said. “Every episode, we instruct the chefs just to make tasting portions; we don’t need a lot of food. You will see an episode where the chefs have to make a multiple array of plates, so we made sure we told the crew that nothing would go to waste and that once judging was finished, we would be able to offer them all tasting portions of the dishes. That was really fun, because everyone’s either been filming or mic-ing all these chefs and they’ve been listening to us talk about food, so it was nice to be able to share that with our extended crew. And we have a really big crew.”
“Then also, with our pantry, there’s a point at which the produce just doesn’t look as beautiful, but it’s still totally wonderful and great to use. Once something maybe is a little wilted but still great, we replace it, but we give it to our crew,” she added. “There’s almost like a mini shopping area where our art department, our camera operators, our producers could just say, ‘Oh, can I have dibs on those edible flowers?’“
Elsewhere, the “Taste the Nation” host and “Padma’s All American” cookbook author also pointed out how often patriotism makes its way into her work.
“Without meaning to, I’ve really leaned into this word. I think because in a climate where we’re having a lot of people exclude citizens from being considered truly American, it was important for me to reclaim that. It’s why on the book cover you see me standing in front of a flag, because I thought that the flag was hijacked by a certain kind of white supremacist ideology,” she shared. “Our country has been built by many hands of many colors. America, for thousands of years, was Brown. It’s only been white majority for a couple hundred years. But the ‘Cup’ is, again, an allusion to the sports of it all.”
“I wanted to be able to, as the creator of the show, make sure we could have ‘Italy’s Culinary Cup,’ ‘Australia’s Culinary Cup.’ I’m a producer, this is what I do,” Lakshmi added. “Our industry is contracting in a way that we’ve never seen in the history of its existence, and I am looking to build out the portfolio of my production company. I want my legacy to be having taught as many people in the world about food — where it comes from, how to make it, the emotionality of it, its cultural significance, how it’s more than just what feeds us, how it’s political and how it’s just the way that most human beings regularly connect.”
Ultimately, the 16-time Emmy nominee is proud of the show she’s served up for CBS every Wednesday after “Survivor” Season 50.
“I’m not a chef, I’m creating a show for chefs. So it was very important to me to elicit the council and opinions of people that are captains in the industry that I respect. Some of the judges who came on the show also filled out a whole questionnaire that we mailed out … We wound up not having space to include all of that. We did so much that we didn’t have the real estate in a network show to actually explore, like the point system, the categories,” Lakshmi concluded. “In the second season, I think we can slow down, let our judges give more opinions, go into analyzing some of that in the way that they do with any other sports stats.”
“America’s Culinary Cup” Season 1 is available to stream on Paramount+.
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