Top Chef's main course, served raw

As Bravo’s Top Chef heads into its second season finale with a bitter showdown between its two top antagonists, we must salute its tasty model host, whom we were prepared to dislike, just as we were prepared to ignore this show until we surfed by-- and stopped.

And returned.

Good show. Good host.

We'd written about Padma Lakshmi on another website shortly before the season‘s premiere. We knew she was a model and Bollywood actress who’d written a cookbook, flaunted a hideous scar on her right arm, and happened to be Salman Rushdie’s trophy wife! In an interview with the LA Times, she seemed to exhibit the sort of up-herself haughtiness one would expect from a pretty young British empire climber who’d latched onto a respected old author.

"I hate reality TV, I have to tell you," the latest reality TV discovery told the LA Times back int he fall. "I think a lot of it brings out the worst common denominator of the human spirit."

She promised that her season of Top Chef would be "a very high-caliber, high-brow food show. "I didn't want it to turn into some kind of schlocky reality piece of fluff that I would feel embarrassed about."

Well, no reason to be embarrassed at all!

In the end, Top Chef is schlocky reality fluff at its finest! And while we mentioned that with all her talking, Padma “sounds like the next TV superstar,” she’s proven to be an ingratiating presence, sampling dishes, describing tastes and wandering into the test kitchen in a low-key, down-to-earth manner that makes Heidi Klum look like a stiff.

We found a site that has an even grander tribute to Padma’s assets (and titsets) here.