Top Chef devotees like yours truly were absolutely devastated last week when long-time host Padma Lakshmi revealed that she would be leaving the show after last night’s Season 20 finale. At the time, Lakshmi’s announcement felt abrupt. Why was she suddenly packing her proverbial knives and moving on to new projects when the hit Bravo show was celebrating a globe-trotting “World All-Stars” season? But now, after watching Buddha Lo become the first back-to-back Top Chef winner in history, I get it. Top Chef Season 20 felt simultaneously like a victory lap for the iconic reality show and proof that the series needs some drastic reinvention in order to survive much longer.
Padma Lakshmi picked the absolute perfect time to leave Top Chef.
Top Chef premiered on Bravo in 2006, a time when the cable network was replacing its high brow arts content with reality programming like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Project Runway, Blow Out, and the original Real Housewives franchise. Top Chef Season 1 was hosted by Katie Lee, a then twenty-something foodie blogger most famous at the time for being married to Billy Joel. Bravo immediately replaced Lee in Season 2 with model, actress, award-winning cookbook author, host of multiple food shows, and soon-to-be Salman Rushdie’s ex, Padma Lakshmi.
Lakshmi brought an instant jolt of class to Bravo’s fledgling foodie hit. Her years on all the big high fashion catwalks gave her a natural aura of glamour and confidence. Her extensive knowledge of international cuisine imbued her critiques with gravitas. She was something of a culinary goddess, gobsmacking the chefs with her beauty before appropriately handing them their asses for under-seasoning dishes and screwing up their rice.
As the show rose in the ratings and became a late ’00s megahit, Lakshmi soon became synonymous with Top Chef. Her intelligence, grace, and easy charisma allowed her to woo the audience as easily as she charmed the most intimidating chefs and restaurant critics in the world. In many ways, Top Chef would never have been the phenomenon it became without Padma Lakshmi’s grace, intelligence, and humor. Which is why Top Chef fans were literally heartbroken last week to learn she would be leaving the show after 19 seasons. Now, however, it makes sense.
As a long-time Top Chef obsessive, I’ve had a complex relationship with Season 20, aka World All-Stars. For the first time ever, Top Chef left the United States and shot most of the season in London. Contestants were a mix of winners and fan favorites from all over the world. On the one hand, I’ve absolutely loved meeting chefs from foreign Top Chef franchises. On the other, I never felt the season gelled until mid-way through, specifically with a tortuous mis-en-place relay elimination challenge. My biggest issue, however, was the lack of dramatic tension throughout the season. Not only were all the chefs already so established that a win wouldn’t be as life-changing as it normally would be, but it was also obvious who would be the ultimate winner: Season 19 champ Buddha Lo.
In Top Chef‘s early days, the contestants were a mix of talented sous chefs and kooky cooks. As the show gained momentum and began crowning a new generation of celeb chefs, James Beard award-winners and Food & Wine darlings began flooding the competition. Top Chef remained top tier reality TV, but it doubled as a farm team for new Food Network talent. The show’s ability to mint stars is borne out in how many alums come back as esteemed judges, pop up in commercials, host their own shows, or have literally wound up as Iron Chefs.
Much like The Great British Baking Show, Top Chef has influenced over a decade of imitators in the food television space. Ironically, one of the few truly great and innovative shows to emerge in the genre of late comes from Padma Lakshmi herself. In Hulu’s Taste the Nation, Lakshmi embeds herself in regional cuisine, Anthony Bourdain-style, but in an effort to celebrate the proverbial melting pot that is America. Lakshmi has received near universal acclaim for Taste the Nation and it seems she wants to double down on the series. In her exit letter to Top Chef fans, she wrote: “I feel it’s time to move on and need to make space for Taste the Nation, my books, and other creative pursuits.”
Top Chef will never be the same without Padma Lakshmi. Sure, they could find a decent replacement*, but why? Top Chef today already looks nothing like the Top Chef of yore. It has transformed into a sort of cliche of itself, returning to the same twists again and again. The contestants approach its challenges with strategies firmly in place and recipes seemingly at the ready. It’s not a coincidence that the best episodes in Season 20 were the ones that threw the rare curveball the chefs’ way, be it turning the mis-en-place relay into the elimination challenge or getting rid of the “front of house” position in Restaurant Wars. Top Chef‘s power as a food show giant is fading as its formula becomes rote.
Padma Lakshmi is sagely leaving Top Chef just as the reality show is starting to go stale. The World All-Stars season was enjoyable to watch, but also felt like an opulent swan song to the show’s twenty season run. It was Top Chef celebrating the impact its had anointing a generation of culinary superstars, rather than looking to the future of food programming. That is something that Lakshmi is doing alone as she bids farewell to the show she helped catapult into the stratosphere so she can forge new trails in her personal life and food TV.
Lakshmi’s departure marks more than the end of an era. It’s the end of Top Chef as we know it. And I feel fine.
*If Bravo wants to continue Top Chef without Padma Lakshmi, I could see Kristen Kish as an apt and obvious replacement. Like Lakshmi, Kish has that former model, successful host, cookbook author pedigree, with the added bonus of being the winner of Top Chef Season 10. I could see it, but do I want to see it?