After ‘Top Chef,’ Padma Lakshmi Returns With a Bold New Cooking Contest [Exclusive]

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Published Feb 25, 2026, 5:01 PM EST

Ryan O'Rourke is a Senior News Writer at Collider with a specific interest in all things adult animation, video game adaptations, and the work of Mike Flanagan. He is also an experienced baseball writer with over six years of articles between multiple outlets, most notably FanSided's CubbiesCrib. Whether it's taking in a baseball game, a new season of Futurama or Castlevania: Nocturne, or playing the latest From Software title, he is always finding ways to show his fandom. When it comes to gaming and anything that takes inspiration from it, he is deeply opinionated on what's going on. Outside of entertainment, he's a graduate of Eureka College with a Bachelor's in Communication where he honed his craft as a writer. Between The IV Leader at Illinois Valley Community College and The Pegasus at Eureka, he spent the majority of his college career publishing articles on everything from politics to campus happenings and, of course, entertainment for the student body. Those principles he learned covering the 2020 election, Palestine, and so much more are brought here to Collider, where he has gleefully written on everything from the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes to Nathan Lane baby-birding sewer boys.

For 19 seasons, Padma Lakshmi was known primarily for her work as the host of the cooking competition, Top Chef, presiding over a tense battle of culinary wits and endurance among a group of professional chefs. In 2023, though, she packed up her knives and left after Season 20 to focus on her other creative and business endeavors. Now, the world of kitchen clashes is about to welcome her back with a new series at a new network. Ahead of its CBS premiere on March 4, we're excited to include America's Culinary Cup in Collider's Exclusive Preview series for upcoming spring television shows and films, and feature a new image highlighting the moment the stoves heat up.

America's Culinary Cup shares a bit of DNA with Top Chef, as it similarly pits a group of top-notch cooks against each other to find who is the best of the best. However, the focus of this new format will introduce some variety by testing each of the competitors against the show's so-called ten culinary commandments — "Meat, Vegetables, Sauces, Dessert, Innovation, Flavors, Sustainability, World Cuisine, Consistency, Culinary Science and Technology." Lakshmi, alongside fellow judges Michael Cimarusti and Wylie Dufresne, will test each dish not just on taste, but also on how the chef presents it, their mastery of the techniques, and their overall creativity when put on the spot. The competition will up the pressure as it slowly whittles down its pool of 16 competitors to just one who has been deemed to have mastered the ten culinary commandments and wins the $1 million grand prize, the highest amount ever awarded for a cooking competition.

Season 1 went all out to find some truly decorated culinarians from across the country to make the series as intense as possible. Making up the 16 competitors are Kim Alter, Katie Button, Keith Corbin, Rochelle Daniel, Diana Dávila, Michael Díaz de León, Sol Han, Russell Jackson, Beverly Kim, Buddha Lo, Chris Morgan, Matt Peters, Malyna Si, Cara Stadler, Philip Tessier, and Emily Yuen. Among that group are six Michelin-starred chefs, two Bocuse d’Or medalists, two James Beard Award winners, and 14 James Beard Award nominees, without mentioning the mountain of other accolades these chefs have accrued.

Why Did Padma Lakshmi Return for 'America's Culinary Cup'?

In addition to hosting and judging America's Culinary Cup, Lakshmi also produces for Delicious Entertainment, alongside Susan Rovner for Aha Studios. Josh Silberman, who's no stranger to food-based competitions after serving as a producer on the Keke Palmer-hosted Foodtastic for Disney+, is at the helm as the showrunner. The decision for Lakshmi to get back into the reality cooking game only three years after leaving her post at Bravo came out of a desire to introduce a new twist to the genre. She felt the Culinary Cup was exactly that, and something she was more than willing to put her Top Chef credentials behind. "I’ve obviously had almost two decades of experience in the genre, and I thought the genre was ready for a shake-up, for a refresh, and for something new and different," she told press at CBS’s presentation at the Television Critics Association Winter Tour. "And I wanted to be the one who did it."

America's Culinary Cup premieres with a special 90-minute debut next Wednesday, March 4, at 9:30 p.m. ET/PT. Check out our exclusive image above and stay tuned here at Collider throughout the week for more sneak peeks from our spring preview series.

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