Padma Lakshmi has put dating on the back burner while raising her teenage daughter and continuing to foster her culinary career.
“It’s really difficult to navigate, you know, being a single mom and being lucky enough to have the full career that I do and also dating,” Lakshmi, 55, exclusively told Us Weekly while promoting America’s Culinary Cup. “I think dating at my age is precarious.”
The America’s Culinary Cup host and executive producer confessed she’s “much more guarded” about letting someone new into her world now that she’s older.
“I don’t know, do I let this person in my house? Do I ask them for a background check? Like, you know, I’m not sure,” Lakshmi said. “I know that seems rude, but you know, I’m very risk-averse, so it’s difficult.”
Padma Lakshmi. Noam Galai/Getty Images for Gold House
The professional chef confirmed she’s “still single” before teasing, “I’ll leave it at that.”
Lakshmi noted that aside from being a bit guarded, she has her “hands full” working on America’s Culinary Cup after publishing her latest cookbook, Padma’s All American: Tales, Travels, and Recipes from Taste the Nation and Beyond: A Cookbook, last November.
She also told Us she’s busy “taking care of my family and my mother, my daughter,” but that doesn’t mean Lakshmi is done with romance forever.
“I think when it’s the right time and the right person, it’ll just happen,” she concluded.
Lakshmi shares her only child, daughter Krishna, 16, with ex Adam Dell, whom she dated following her divorce from Salman Rushdie in 2007. Lakshmi and Dell, 56, dated from 2009 to 2012 before rekindling their romance in 2017. They split for good in 2021.
While Lakshmi sparked romance rumors with Top Chef alum Melissa King in fall 2025, Us confirmed in November 2025 that they are “just close friends.”
Krishna Lakshmi-Dell and Padma Lakshmi. Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for CBS
Lakshmi, meanwhile, told Us earlier this month that she is focused on being a mom and businesswoman more than anything these days.
“No two days are alike with a teenager at home. So I never know, you know, what she’s gonna come home from school with,” she shared of life as a single mother. “She’s very happy. I’m lucky she’s doing well. And you know, it’s a joy to watch her grow every day.”
When it comes to work, Lakshmi said season 1 of America’s Culinary Cup has become like her second baby.
“The biggest thing [I wanted to bring to this show] was really just to give the chefs every ingredient, weapon, appliance that they would need to sort of take away all of the tricks and gimmicks that sometimes [happen] in reality programming,” Lakshmi explained to Us. “Just to make it more exciting, we throw obstacles in their way [on other series]. We ask them to cook with children’s instruments or something like that. And I just wanted to see what they could do when it was only about the cooking.”
Suzanne Goin, Padma Lakshmi and Daniela Soto-Innes. Jackie Brown/CBS
Lakshmi said that making the show solely about the contestants’ talents has helped it become the No. 1 food competition show on TV.
“I’m proud of all my producers and the chefs, frankly, they cook their hearts out,” she gushed. “We took a risk, you know, to say, ‘No, this is going to be about the purity of cooking,’ and it was a gamble. And luckily, people are watching.”
Lakshmi added that because of the high calibre of chefs on season 1, she “didn’t get a bad meal,” which fans can see by her reaction week after week with the final dishes.
America’s Culinary Cup airs on CBS Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET with the season finale airing on Wednesday, May 13.
