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Padma Lakshmi joins Conde Nast Traveler to share what she’s learned about food from traveling across 7 countries, and their states and cities. From New York’s unmatched global cuisine to London’s Indian food scene, Miami’s Cuban breakfast rituals, and unforgettable dishes in Paris, Morocco, Japan, Singapore, and India, discover Padma’s favorite street food, hidden gems, and must-try restaurants around the world.
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New episodes of America's Culinary Cup are available live and on-demand on Paramount+ for Paramount+ Premium subscribers, or on-demand Thursday for Paramount+ Essential subscribers.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00It's pretty hot, I'm not gonna lie, even for me.
00:03I'm Padma Lakshmi, I'm a writer and producer,
00:05and I'm going to tell you one thing I learned
00:09about food in every place I've been to.
00:15I've learned everything I know about food
00:18from living in New York.
00:20It's the greatest food city in the world.
00:22If you're in New York, make sure you have a long list
00:25of different ethnic foods you wanna try.
00:27Everything from Tibetan to Burmese, to Ecuadorian,
00:32Arabic food, Lebanese food, Palestinian food, Persian food,
00:37any kind of food you could want, you can find it in New York.
00:40And not only in New York, you can find it just in Queens,
00:43one of our boroughs.
00:44And if you love shopping for spices, go to the spice store,
00:48Kalisjian's Foods of the World.
00:50It's at 123 Lexington Avenue near 28th Street.
00:53And it's so inspiring.
00:55You really feel like cooking when you go there.
00:57There's nothing you can't find.
01:02London, really?
01:03Want me to tell you one thing?
01:05Just one thing I've learned?
01:06One thing I can tell you is that the national dish of the UK
01:11is actually chicken tikka masala.
01:13And if you have any interest in eating that,
01:16or any Indian food,
01:18you have such a choice of great Indian restaurants.
01:20Of course, Darjeeling Express is one that I would recommend,
01:24but also Dishum for a faster bite,
01:27and like a diner-style pan-Indian way,
01:30kind of Bombay food style.
01:32It's delicious also.
01:34But Gymkhana is great as well.
01:36You can't go wrong with Indian food in London.
01:39London also has great Persian food as well.
01:42Of course, lots of great Lebanese food,
01:45and haka cuisine, a lot of good haka cuisine.
01:48I mean, one good thing about your own home culture
01:51having really bad food is that you invite lots of other people
01:55to come cook for you,
01:56and that's what the biggest colonialists in history have done.
02:03Everyone knows that in Miami,
02:04you have a good Cuban population,
02:06but one of the hidden gems is actually breakfast.
02:09It's a whole ritual, and it's delicious.
02:11Everybody does it.
02:13You go, you get a little cafe, cafecito,
02:16a cup of coffee, and a pastelito,
02:19and they're usually these wonderful little pastries
02:21with guava jam, and sometimes they have cream cheese.
02:24It's a tradition and a ritual
02:26for all the Cuban dudes out in Miami.
02:32If you go to D.C.,
02:34there's a great Afghan restaurant called Lapis.
02:37Really good Afghan food is hard to find,
02:39and this is extraordinary.
02:40I wasn't aware until I filmed Taste the Nation,
02:44but there's a really large Afghan community,
02:47and there's layers of them from each decade,
02:50unfortunately, of difficulty in Afghanistan,
02:53from the Russian invasion to the Taliban,
02:55and so on and so on,
02:57but what it makes for is this vibrant,
02:59interesting community and this great food scene.
03:02They have dumplings called mantou.
03:05They have all kinds of different stews,
03:08and of course, rice dishes.
03:10The only ones who know how to make rice,
03:12as well as Indian people, are Afghan and Persians.
03:18This I didn't know, and I had been to Puerto Rico
03:20a couple of times, but when I did this giant road trip
03:24all up and down Puerto Rico,
03:26there is a place called Ruta de Lechon.
03:29It's literally a pork highway, and you can stop,
03:32and you can get a bunch of little cuts of meat and keep going
03:37and make pit stops along the way.
03:39It's literally a pork highway.
03:45Texas is really interesting.
03:47There's lots of different foods.
03:49You know, of course, Austin is known for barbecue,
03:52so there's Franklin's, there's Lay Barbecue, there's Salt Lick,
03:57but then you go to a place like Houston, and it has so much diversity.
04:02You can get amazing Indian food, amazing Vietnamese food,
04:06the largest Nigerian community in America, or maybe even outside of Nigeria.
04:11There's a lot of them there because of higher education
04:14and because of the oil industry.
04:15There's this giant West African supermarket.
04:20One of the restaurants I learned how to cook in was called Safari.
04:25Also in El Paso, there's a great little mom-and-pop Mexican restaurant called El Emi,
04:33and I learned not only how to make salsa macho there,
04:37but I also learned how to nixtamalize corn
04:39and make masa for homemade, handmade corn tortillas.
04:47I know when people go to Las Vegas, they think of all these giant restaurants,
04:52you know, and these mega casinos, but it doesn't have to be like that.
04:55You don't have to eat from a buffet and you don't have to eat
04:58some big chef's watered-down food that he only visits twice a year.
05:02You can actually have great Thai food.
05:05There's a wonderful Thai community in Las Vegas.
05:08That's because of Nellis Air Force Base and GIs who brought back Thai brides,
05:14Thai war brides during the Vietnam War.
05:16So they've been there for a good 40, 50 years.
05:19There's a great restaurant called Lotus of Siam.
05:22It does not disappoint.
05:24It's delicious.
05:28One of the places that opened my palate and my imagination to how wonderful cheese could be
05:34was Paris.
05:36And I didn't have a lot of money in those days,
05:38and I would just go to the market,
05:39and I would probably try the patience of the cheese monger a lot,
05:42but I would try all different kinds of cheeses.
05:45It opened up a world of flavor and umami that I never knew existed.
05:51I grew up using Kraft Parmesan cheese out of that green canister.
05:57And in India, the cheese is even worse.
06:00We had this weird cube cheese product that was not even real cheese from Amal.
06:05It was like a cross between laughing cow and something they'd eat in space, I think.
06:11So my knowledge of cheese and my appreciation for cheese really just blossomed and exploded
06:17when I was first modeling in Paris in the early 90s.
06:26I have been to Morocco several times in my life.
06:29One thing I learned about is how useful preserved lemons are in cooking.
06:34I also learned how to use a tagine for the first time,
06:37which is a wonderful way of steam-baking anything to keep anything from a roast chicken
06:42really, really tender, though of course you won't get that crispy skin,
06:46to just cooking vegetables in a stew.
06:49And it's one of the most beautiful and healthy ways to cook.
06:52Also, go to the YSL, the Yves Saint Laurent Gardens in Marrakesh.
06:58They're so beautiful.
07:00Yves Saint Laurent spent a lot of time in Morocco,
07:02between Paris and Morocco.
07:03We had a beautiful home there.
07:05And they had these gorgeous gardens that they've now turned into a museum.
07:12Los Angeles has a great food scene too,
07:15but you really have to search for it because Los Angeles is diverse.
07:19But my impression is that the different ethnic communities don't really commingle.
07:26You can have great Asian food.
07:28Of course, you have amazing Mexican food.
07:30They're all in different parts of the city.
07:32One place I would go to, which is in the San Gabriel Valley, is Alhambra.
07:37Alhambra has a really big Chinese community, really great food.
07:41There's one giant restaurant that I recently went to called Mountain House.
07:45And they have this amazing poached seafood and pickled cabbage soup.
07:51And it's delicious.
07:53It's so healthy for you.
07:54The portions are really large.
07:56It comes bubbling hot.
07:58And it's a wonderful place to go on a date or for a big giant Sunday brunch with your friends
08:03or family.
08:07All I ate when I was in Nashville, Tennessee was hot chicken.
08:12I watched the person eating that chicken with me turn from a pale white to a beet red pink.
08:20It's pretty hot.
08:21I'm not going to lie.
08:22Even for me.
08:23When I think of Nashville, I think of Johnny Cash or the Patsy Cline Museum.
08:28I usually associate it with country music and predominantly white folk.
08:34I'm not going to lie.
08:34And so I was surprised.
08:36But, you know, whenever I've had hot chicken, it has been an African-American cooking it for me.
08:41They can eat spicy food just as spicy as I do.
08:45So I'm not so surprised, but it was surprising to find it there.
08:52What I love about Hawaii is the interplay between indigenous Hawaiian food
08:57and Japanese food.
09:00You can see how seamlessly both cultures meld into each other.
09:04And you can see how Hawaiian food and all the abundant seafood there has also benefited
09:10from Japanese knife skills and technique.
09:14And it's just such a natural marriage.
09:16And it's hard to see where one cuisine starts and the other stops sometimes.
09:20But it doesn't matter because it's all delicious.
09:23It's so fresh.
09:24Eat all the poke you can find.
09:26There's great places, which are just fish markets, but have prepared poke behind the counter.
09:32And while I would normally not eat raw fish at a convenience store in Hawaii,
09:38it's really good and okay to do so most of the time.
09:45There's nobody who's serious about food that I know that isn't obsessed with Japan.
09:50Even going to the 7-Eleven in Japan for snacks is an odyssey unto itself.
09:56I brought back so many different things.
09:58Each high-end department store, especially in the Ginza district,
10:02they have these incredible food halls in the basement of these department stores.
10:06And there are so many things.
10:08And one of the things that the Japanese are really good at is ritual.
10:12And the way that they wrap all these candies is extraordinary.
10:16You feel like every time you open a suite, it's an event.
10:20And there's something very luxurious about that.
10:23So definitely go check out the food courts.
10:26But even just getting a bowl of ramen in the Ginza train station was delicious.
10:30And so there's so much to discover.
10:37Oh my God.
10:37In Singapore, there's really no place you can go wrong.
10:40Even a food court in a mall will have a lot of gems.
10:44You don't need to spend a lot of money.
10:45Go to the Nighthawkers and have all the street food.
10:48You have to stay up late for that.
10:49Even in the day, there's a great restaurant called No Sign Board restaurant,
10:54because they for years didn't have a sign.
10:55And you go and you pick your protein.
10:57So you pick the frog you're going to eat or the crab.
11:00I know.
11:00But still, you should know where your food comes from if you're going to eat it.
11:03You must try the black and white pepper crab.
11:07It's delicious.
11:11So for India, I mean, it's hard to cover such a vast country with so many people.
11:16If you're going to Delhi, have kebabs.
11:20There's Bukhara Grill.
11:21It's delicious.
11:22They actually catered my wedding many eons ago.
11:25There's also Indian accent.
11:27But the best street food is also in Delhi.
11:30Go to Bengali market and have Golgappa or Pani Puri.
11:35My record is 36.
11:37See if you can beat it.
11:38But any kind of street food is delicious.
11:40Just be careful.
11:41But make sure there are locals eating there.
11:44When you go to Mumbai, make sure you do have seafood.
11:48And you do eat at a seafood place called Trishna.
11:51But also that you go behind the Taj Hotel in Old Bombay because there's amazing kebabs.
11:58You buy this place called Baremia, which means like big boss, like gangster boss.
12:01It's amazing.
12:02People are eating on the hoods of their cars.
12:05And you can see how they're making the flatbreads.
12:07And it's all so fresh.
12:08And the meat is perfectly juicy but charred.
12:11Some of my relatives won't eat there because they're, you know, sissies about it.
12:15But you can do it.
12:16Just be careful.
12:17In Chennai, any tiffin house that makes dosa, you should go and eat in the old part of Chennai,
12:24which is called Mailapur.
12:25They have tiffin houses and you go and you eat at lunch and you get a thali.
12:29And it's everything you can want.
12:31It's very inexpensive.
12:32It's designed for the working, you know, South Indian businessman to eat lunch fast.
12:37But it's delicious.
12:38See if you can crash a wedding and have a traditional yele meal.
12:41A yele means leaf in Tamil.
12:43And it's literally eating on a banana leaf.
12:45And I don't know why, but food tastes so much better when you're eating it from a banana leaf.
12:50In Kerala, definitely rent a houseboat.
12:53The best South Indian food I've ever had in my whole life,
12:57I'm sorry to all the women in my family,
12:59has been on a houseboat in South India in the backwaters of Alepi.
13:04It's wonderful.
13:05The greatest thing you can do for your intellect, for your point of view,
13:10to broaden your horizons and just become happier and smarter is travel.
13:15There's nothing to beat it.
13:17Whenever I meet a young writer or a young chef and they want to improve their work or,
13:22you know, their creativity, I say, hit the road, Jack.
13:25Even before, you know, you have a lot of responsibilities,
13:30whatever money you have, invest in yourself by investing in travel.
13:33Thank you so much for coming up.
13:34Thank you, my dear.
13:37Thank you very much,
13:37very much for coming up.
13:38Thank you,isto and I'll see you next time.
13:38Thank you, all for being here at this event.
13:38Thank you for coming up,
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