Padma Lakshmi on Building Her Own Cooking Competition After Being ‘Burnt Out’ by ‘Top Chef’: ‘I Didn’t Want to Go Back to Just Being Talent’

Padma Lakshmi didn’t think she’d ever return to cooking competition shows. In 2023, when she stepped away from the Bravo touchstone “Top Chef” after hosting for 19 seasons, Lakshmi was “burnt out” and ready to focus on other projects — like “Taste the Nation,” her Hulu travel series tracing American foodways, and its accompanying cookbook “Padma’s All American,” released last fall. “I just needed to be challenged and do something bigger, to be honest,” Lakshmi says.

But then CBS Entertainment president Amy Reisenbach took Lakshmi out to dinner and started asking questions. “What if you could do it your way?…