What PADMA Wants

After almost two decades of TOP CHEF, the beloved HOST and cookbook AUTHOR is figuring out WHAT COMES NEXT

- THESSALY LA FORCE

According to Padma Lakshmi, there are several reasons why she left Top Chef.

It is a cold, wintry morning in New York, and I'm sitting across from Lakshmi at the Mercer hotel in SoHo as she explains her thinking. She is dressed casually in jeans and a long-sleeve shirt-but she had arrived bundled in a cropped fuchsia faux-fur Tom Ford jacket, a recent present to herself. We order breakfast. For her, two eggs poached, with a side of avocado and sourdough toast.

"It was really taking a toll on me physically to digest that much food in a day," Lakshmi explains in that unmistakable voice, low and mellifluous like honey sliding down a spoon. After 19 seasons, she had reached her limit. Each year, she gained 10 to 15 pounds within six weeks. She started taping the show in 2006, when she was 35. Now she is 53. ("Nobody tells you that about perimenopause," she says. "Your tits get huge.") Her metabolism isn't what it used to be. "I live in the fucking gym," she says. Making Top Chef meant weeks at a time away from home. She had spent every birthday in recent memory on set. Lakshmi also has a 14-year-old daughter, Krishna, or #LittleHands, as she affectionately calls her on Instagram, and is acutely aware that she will soon, in the not-so-distant future, become an empty nester. And so, while taping in London the summer before last, she made the call. "I think I knew by a very precise moment," she says.