Padma Lakshmi Wears a Tight, Cleavage-Revealing Dress to Read The New York Times

The Gray Lady never looked so good. Why, oh why, possums, can't Padma always look like this on Top Chef? And we loved how her accent on this video miraculously became plummier, lilting, more elegant, with a touch of Indian, a step "up" from the Valley Girl stoner drawl we get on Top Chef. (We also love the idea of her reading, Lady Bountiful-like, bits from the Times to uninformed cheftestants and camera people, improving their little minds with news of the conflict in Ossetia and Cathy Horyn's musings on Lagerfeld.) What all of this seems impliedly to admit is that she considers Top Chef a bit of slumming. Who'd've thunk?

Did Raggaydy Andy Suffer a Lip Slip?

As you must all know by now, possums, The New York Times just last week tackled chefs and their potty, potty mouths, paying special attention to this season's cheftestants on Top Chef.

It seems somehow fitting, then, that Raggaydy Andy Cohen's own loose lips may just have let something slip. It's what we found when we read a blog entry by Pete Wells, the reporter who penned the piece:

Reporting the article, I interviewed Andy Cohen, the Bravo executive responsible for Top Chef. Before he got down to talking how much bleeping this season’s contestants have required, he suggested, out of nowhere, that The Times run an article on how many female chefs there are. We’ve done that, I told him, impatient to move on to the gutter language. But now I’m wondering if he was inadvertently telling me something about the outcome of this season. After all, no woman has won yet. So I’ll just toss that into the rumor mill.

Interesting, of course, but we don't at all believe that Raggaydy Andy was revealing the winner of the show, quite simply because the finale has not yet been filmed and the winner not yet chosen. However, we do believe something was revealed, because take a look at what then happened on Wells' blog entry:

UPDATE: Andy Cohen called this afternoon to say I’d misquoted him in this blog. He claims the article he suggested to me was about “lesbian female chefs.” That’s not what I heard and it’s not what I took down in my notes, but the phone he was speaking on during that interview didn’t pick up every word he said, and I had to ask him to repeat himself several times. I never asked him to repeat the remark about “female chefs,” though. So it’s quite possible that he’s right and the word “lesbian” was dropped.

Uh-huh, yeah, right. As one of the post's commenters notes, "lesbian female - That would have been a bit redundant, no?" Indeed it would, particularly coming from someone who is openly gay himself. So, as polite as Wells is being in his equivocating, we're going with the Gray Female, er, Lady on this one.

So what's the upshot of all of this? Our guess is, two women in the final four, Stephanie Izard and likely Antonia Lofaso as well.