Features

Photo Credit: Cheyenne Ellis

BY JONATHAN SOROFF

Padma Lakshmi, 40, host of Bravo’s Emmy Award–winning Top Chef, was raised in India, New York and California before earning a degree in theater arts from Clark University in Worcester. She won international fame as the first Indian supermodel and acted in film and television, but established herself as a culinary expert by hosting three food programs and writing the best-selling cookbook Easy Exotic, followed by Tangy, Tart, Hot and Sweet. She has anchored shows for the Food Network and recently finished her sixth season as host of Top Chef. Briefly married to author Salman Rushdie, she has her own line of culinary products, Easy Exotic, as well as jewelry, the Padma Collection, which is sold by retailers like Bergdorf Goodman. A cofounder of the Endometriosis Foundation of America, she has also written for magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Gourmet. She lives in New York with her daughter.

Jonathan Soroff: Your career has so many odd hyphenates. How do you describe yourself?
Padma Lakshmi: Tired.

Where do you get the energy?
I must’ve slept in a previous life.

How do you stay so thin?
I run up and down stairs all day long: I do 70 flights a day in my stairwell. I carry a jump-rope in my suitcase and I use it. I’ve been boxing for 10 years. I just exercise as often as I can.

Favorite cuisine?
Anything somebody else cooks. [Laughs.] One thing that happens when you write cookbooks is that friends think they’re a menu, and they say, “I want to come over and have…” So I like when other people cook for me.

If I were to show up at your house unexpectedly, what would you make me to eat?
Probably a grilled-cheese sandwich.

If you had to give up all but one of your careers, which would it be?
I’d probably keep my job as a writer.

What should home cooks leave to professionals?
Desserts. I find there are usually cooks and then there are bakers. Baking is an exact science.

What about things like Chinese cooking, where your average American kitchen doesn’t have enough heat?
True. It requires very high heat, and it’s not just the stove. It’s also the vessel. They weigh a lot. So you’ll mostly find men in the kitchen because they have the physical strength to toss around woks. I also think that’s why the restaurant business in general is dominated by male chefs. At a professional level, doing 100 covers a night is manually exhausting. It requires a lot of technique and creativity, but it’s also physically rigorous.

Do you have a favorite cooking shortcut?
Like a restaurant, I do my mise en place ahead of time. I keep the staples in my cooking pre-chopped in my fridge, in containers.

Which cuisine is easiest to master?
Italian food is very approachable. I wouldn’t say it’s easy to master, but it’s easy to familiarize yourself with it. To truly master any kind of cuisine you have to live with it, and that takes time.

Is there one food you can’t go without eating?
I’m Asian, so if I don’t have rice or noodles for a week, I’m pretty much jonesing for it.

Worst part of modeling?
If the phone rings, you’ve got to grab your passport and your bag and just go, so I wound up canceling plans with friends and family a lot. The lack of a home life is very difficult.

Best part?
The travel and the money. In that order.

Defining characteristic of a good cookbook?
A mix of more advanced, difficult or sophisticated recipes and some easy, simple and quick ones. Like your diet, it should be balanced and varied.

Favorite spice?
My single favorite spice is the dried red chili.

Describe your life as a recipe or dish.
I think the last recipe in my book, which is one of my favorites, is what I call the WD-40 of the kitchen. It’s chili-honey butter. It’s got a lot of fat. It’s very sweet. And very spicy.

Kitchen implement you can’t live without?
My wooden spoon.

Most unconventional use you’ve ever made of a kitchen tool?
[Laughs.] Sorry, that’s private.

Do you have a seduction dish?
Yeah. [Laughs.]

But I’m not likely to find out what it is?
No. I can’t give away all my secrets. I have to save some for my next book.

Is there a silver bullet in the kitchen?
You can always turn anything into a soup. I was once cooking a big dinner, and Vanity Fair was covering it. I was supposed to make chocolate ice cream but the ice cream maker was not working, so I just made chilled chocolate soup. No one knew the difference.

So is my homegirl Tiffani Faison [chef at Rocca] going to win on Top Chef All-Stars?
Watch what happens.

Favorite chef or restaurant?
My favorite restaurant, just because it feels like home, is Indochine in New York.

Favorite fashion designer of the moment?
I’m wearing a lot of Antonio Berardi.

Is there a jewelry designer you emulate?
No. I love a lot of designers and periods, but other influences, as well. I’m very drawn to Alexander Calder’s mobiles, for instance. Like my cookbooks, my jewelry is a pastiche or collage of my experiences and the cultural references that have made an impression on me.

What will I always find in your refrigerator?
A whole bunch of different hot sauces, from the very pedestrian Sriracha or Tapatío to more exotic sauces. There’s also a lot of cheeses. A lot of bottles of Champagne. And lots of leaves: bay leaves, kaffir lime leaves, basil, cilantro, mint.

What characteristic unifies all the different disciplines you’ve pursued?
I’m interested in producing work or things that bring people pleasure, whether it’s something to eat, a piece of jewelry, a book.

Grossest thing you ever ate?
[Laughs.] A chocolate ganache with a piece of liver embedded in it, made by [season two Top Chef–winner] Ilan Hall.

Grossest thing you ever cooked?
I’m not big into offal or innards, but one time when I was still in high school, we took all the organ meats of a turkey and boiled them into a stew. That wasn’t too great.

Fantasy guest list for a dinner party?
Oh, fun! OK, I would like to cook for Muhammad Ali, Marilyn Monroe, Toulouse-Lautrec, Confucius, Einstein and Cleopatra. But I’d also invite my mom and daughter to share the experience.

Is the way to a man’s heart really through his stomach?
Yes, and a couple of other places. [Laughs.]

Person you most like to be compared to?
I don’t. Everyone’s led a different life. If you look at my own personal history, growing up between Asia and America and then spending most of my 20s in Europe, and then moving back to the States… that really shaped who I am and my points of view, and that would be difficult to recreate in someone else. Which is a long-winded way of not answering your question.

As someone who has spent a fair amount of your life on airplanes, what would you do to fix the food situation?
I’d do more simple things. I think people on planes are looking for comfort, and a lot of comfort foods reheat well, so they’re ideal.

Last question: If you had to spend the rest of your life in exile, where would it be and why?
New York City, because I don’t ever want to leave here. I don’t even want to go across a bridge or through a tunnel. I’m a true New Yorker. I’m just happiest here.

Photograph: Cheyenne Ellis; wardrobe styling: René Garza; dress: Marie Saint Pierre; hair: Michael Duenas/Exclusive Artists/Schwartzkopf; makeup: Michelle Brown