JD Vance Torched by 'Top Chef' Alum Over 'Disgusting Ranch Dressing' Meal He Cooked for His Indian Wife Usha
Padma Lakshmi bashed JD Vance after he shared the 'inedible' first meal he cooked for wife Usha.
March 2 2026, Published 4:45 p.m. ET
JD Vance's self-deprecating story of the worst meal he ever cooked for his wife, Usha, was met by disgust and contempt by former Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi, RadarOnline.com can reveal.
Lakshmi, 55, who, like Usha, 40, is of Indian descent, sneered at the Vice President, 41, for not using traditional ingredients from their heritage and instead using "ranch dressing" atop vegetables.
JD Vance Cooked an 'Inedible' First Meal for Usha
JD Vance revealed the first meal he ever cooked for Usha was the worst one.
Both Vance and Usha sat down with Lara Trump for a Fox News interview in February.
"Usha once said that you did not know how to cook much before you met her. So what is the best and worst dish that you ever cooked for your wife?" the First Daughter-in-Law asked.
"The worst is very easy. Usha’s a vegetarian, and I am not. So I'm thinking to myself, what does a vegetarian eat? Vegetables, dairy, and bread," Vanc recalled.
"So, I went to the grocery store. I got those crescent rolls that you can get that are very good. I rolled them out into a pizza shape, and put vegetables and ranch on top, and stuck it in the oven for 30 minutes."
He admitted, "It was disgusting. Like, it was actually inedible."
'He Does Really Well'
Usha Vance said her husband has become a much better cook than when they first met in the 2010s.
Usha went on to reveal that her husband has come a long way since that cooking fail years ago.
Vance shared that he has a love of baking, and "I'm pretty good at cooking now. But I can make a pretty good brioche bread."
Usha raved, "Most recently it's been Shokupan, which is the Japanese milk bread...he's been working on it for a while, and he does it really well."
'There Are So Many Reasons to Hate JD Vance'
Padma Lakshmi made it known she hates JD Vance, as well as his early cooking attempts.
Lakshmi zeroed in on Vance's original awful mess of a dish he made for Usha early in the romance during a recent visit to the Daily Show, calling out what she perceived as cultural insensitivity.
The die-hard Democrat first let it be known how much she despised the Veep, sneering, "There are so many reasons to hate JD Vance, I didn't think we needed a culinary one."
“He's married an Indian woman, so she comes from this very deep, vast culinary tradition, you know, and he's giving her, what was it, ranch dressing?” the America's Culinary Cup host said.
"Who bakes ranch dressing?" Lakshmi asked.
"Also, he's like, ‘She's a vegetarian. She only eats bread, vegetables, and dairy.' You've been married to this person for over a decade, right? And we eat lots of things, right? Rice, lentils, beans, squash, all this stuff," Lakshmi, a fellow vegetarian, huffed about popular items in meat-free diets.
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Padma Laksmi Slams Usha Vance
Lakshmi suggested Usha Vance had bad taste in food.
Lakshmi then called out Usha, who is currently pregnant with the couple's fourth child.
"But, I mean, maybe he knows what she likes because she doesn't really have good taste," the former Bravo star snarked about the second lady.
Lakshmi has been highly critical of President Trump in the past. She called him a "racist buffoon" in 2016 and vowed to "try very hard" to stop him from getting elected president.
In 2019, the CBS star blasted Trump as "a lunatic with a lot of power."
Most recently, Lakshi called her 2025 cookbook, Padma’s All American: Tales, Travels, and Recipes from Taste the Nation and Beyond, a "love letter” to immigrants, while blasting Trump's immigration policies.
"I hope that the book will be a positive way to counteract all the hate," she told Time.
